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Comment by kd5bjo | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly the result of our checkbox-grid comparison shopping culture. "Features" like extra coats of paint and thicker metal cost the manufacturer more than they increase the market value. On the other hand, throwing in a dozen cheap bits of plastic with every vacuum cleaner pays for itself because it can now ostensibly do a dozen more things.

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This frustrates me to no end. I don't mind voting with my wallet and paying for more expensive things if they are better and built to last longer. However it seems a lot of things these days are just more expensive to be fashionable, to sell you a lifestyle full of expensive things that break easily and are not actually built better. I would love to be able to buy more simple, well made things.

> I would love to be able to buy more simple, well made things

Problem is, if we are a minority of folks thinking this way, it won't make sense financially for manufacturers. What's happening with the buy-and-dispose generation is that nobody really cares about quality anymore - which is why the market is going in this way.

I don't think we are in the minority. I think most people would prefer to buy a better-made product that lasts even if it costs a bit more as in the long run it ends up being cheaper. This isn't in the manufacturer's interest though. They would rather sell you 5 or 10 vacuums over your lifetime rather than just 1. This puts more money in the manufacturers pocket and they have zero incentive to keep repair shops in business.

These days it is problematic to even know what products one should be buying because the quality of more brands than not is bad and many of these were well-designed products in the past that come from trusted name companies.

Minority or majority, to me the problem is the impossibility of determining what's quality anymore. "buy the expensive one" gets you plastic crap with more frills. "buy a trusted brand" doesnt' work when all the infinite brands - even formerly reputable ones like GE - are now just stickers for Chinese factories.

Impossibilty is a strong word. Sure, there are no standards bodies rating the quality of a product (those that exist tend to rate it as a "pass/fail" sort of thing.) But there's this thing called the internet where for any item you can think about you can find a tiny group of people obsessed about that item and ask them. It's the modern day "ask a repair shop"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

I wish there was like a rating system for how well-built appliances are. I guess the poor man's version of that is looking at how long the manufacturer's warranty is.

Even better would be to get ahold of the price list of a 3rd party warranty company.

The manufacturer warranty is just as likely to be a financial product as it is to reflect product quality.

www.consumerreports.com

I'm actually on the market for a new kitchen range and I bought a CR subscription last night. I was disappointed. Almost none of the ranges have textual reviews, just a 5-star rating on about 6 different feature points. They each have a User Reviews section, most of which were unpopulated, and the remainder having one or two one-star reviews cursing it for falling apart in the first month. CR has a short blurb about reliability across entire brands, but the range was between 10% and 16% expected failure rate across the small subset of brands that were listed; most of the manufacturers were not even on the list. I'm left about as clueless as when I started.

I'd look for the repair manual.

Well these days, with Amazon, that's what the reviews are for. I've passed on lots of purchases because I looked at the reviews and saw too many negative ones, and bought other things after seeing almost all glowing reviews. A bad-quality product can lead to poor reviews, and this can affect sales.

Manufacturers' warranties are only so useful; a lot of companies make you jump through hoops to actually make use of them. If the product isn't that expensive, you'll end up paying so much in shipping that it just isn't worth bothering with when you can go buy a new one. And you always take the chance that they'll simply deny your claim and then your recourse is to sue them (not worth it for anything under a few thousand dollars) and to post bad reviews.

I'd like to point out an addition to this. Always read the negative reviews. Don't just count them. I put much more weight on the negative reviews than the positive ones. You can frequently tell if the bad experience is due to a user error or if it's a systematic fault in the product.

If a product has 70% negative reviews, of which 90% are operator error, I'll probably still prefer that product to the one with only 30% negative reviews where only 30% are operator error.

That's a good point. A lot of bad reviews are clearly user stupidity: I even see ones where they obviously bought the wrong thing, had unrealistic expectations, etc., and then gave a poor review based on this. Or reviews where the merchant (usually Amazon) screwed up somehow, so they give a poor review to the product.

On the other hand, positive reviews are frequently either lies or fluff, so you're exactly right to weight them much less. A lot of them look like they're written by shills, some of them even clearly say they got the product for free or cheap in exchange for a review, and many are written shortly after acquiring the product so they really haven't had enough time to fairly test it and see if it's reliable long-term.

Also, well-written negative reviews will go into great detail explaining exactly why the product is crap, so look for those. I'm remembering a great (and long) review I read for an automatic cat litterbox which attaches to a toilet here, and sometimes ends up cooking cat turds...

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