It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.
That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances...
The market tends to give consumers what they want.
It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.
The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
So best we can do is observing "revealed preferences", which is what Economists call "what people actually choose".
As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die.
It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us.
Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
To use two relevant examples:
Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack.
Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it.
Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends.
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[0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
I for one "know" this by weighing HN anecdotes I've seen over the years - couple dozen saying that they sell solid stuff, and one or two saying that they used to sell solid stuff, but are now following the trend of replacing metal components with cheap plastics. How do I evaluate that? Brand trust isn't that strong a signal.
So as a consumer, I am unable to decide objectively, just using rumours if there isn't a hard guarantee or a trustworthy evaluation of the quality of all products I could pick. In that situation, I will price in the uncertainty, I will evaluate the rumours and the tendency to produce crappier stuff over time. And when in doubt, buy 4 cheap short-lived washing machines instead of 1 for 4 times the price.
A long warranty, while not a guarantee, is pretty correlated to the product lifespan.
A long warranty is only good if the manufacturer is trustworthy. But untrustworthy manufacturers are one of the causes of the whole problem.
A fix might be warranty terms defined by law, where the manufacturer can pick the duration and nothing else. Disputes should be settled in court or by a neutral board of experts.
Of course this is not a perfect measure, but I do think that a correlation would exist here.
My strong impression is it's hard to do. People may say the want kale, but end up buying donuts.
They weren't lying about wanting to be the kind of person who buys kale. But at the moment of truth, they got donuts "just this once".
A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands.
The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.
1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it.
2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better.
Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently?
It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.
- Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements.
- Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins.
- Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller.
- Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason.
- Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new.
- Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.
I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
You can still do that on most modern fridges, but it's not worth the effort with appliance prices now. They also don't fail often these days.
The same thing happened to furniture.