These things did cost a lot to develop, but for the consumer it’s quite inexpensive. As GP said, we just take these things for granted and don’t notice them.
I guess because there isn't enough time and money to assess the quality and optimize them.
Grocery stores are a marvel for sure. It's a miracle that we can get a season fruit like grapes 365 days a year.
No woo woo necessary. You may be interested in checking this (and related citations) about research on gratitude and psychological well being:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_interv...
One thing we can do is keep a gratitude journal where we write down things we're grateful for. Can literally be grateful for the sun shining, or not experiencing an earthquake, for having the ability to write in a journal in the first place, etc.
It's so, so powerful.
And for kitchenware and dinningware, we still get decent quality for a still rather cheap price. Of course as the article stated it's not easy to determine which one with decent quality, however if customers only aim for the cheapest one of course it won't be good.
Even light switches are pretty cheap. You can get a basic single light switch for around $2. Sure there's decora switches, dimmer switches, and all kinds of other great things for $50+ but the basic $2 ones will still last decades.
I’ve had 2 switches fail over the last 2 years out of the ~40 switches installed in the house. One failed by welding itself closed and another failed by caving into the electrical box when I hit it too hard. Even though the 40 year life expectancy of a single switch sounds good, the reality is that one fails catastrophically every year. I’d love to get more reliable switches that last well over a century, but I’m not aware of anyone that measures this sort of thing.
They're pretty good examples of things that are cheap and don't work very well, if your goal is health and not distraction/entertainment.
The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amazon is full of this. Oddly, the thing I end up trusting these days are in-house brands because the store has some responsibility to make sure their own brand's reputation doesn't get too tarnished.
1: https://www.blokker.nl/blokker-waterkoker-bl-10202---rvs---1...
I have not discovered a way to find one that is not so designed. Regular reviews are useless.
Of course, the downside is that new ones start at £150 or so. So it's difficult to make a financial case (as opposed to an aesthetic, or a principled one) over a £10 special from Tesco.
When you do buy ‘commercial’ kitchen equipment you’ll notice lots of things that are just downright worse. Energy efficiency, safety features, and noise reduction are all things that are _way_ worse than with their domestic counterparts.
Commercial fridges will stay cool even if their door is opened 20 times an hour. Commercial glass washers take a tenth of the time a home dishwasher takes. And if they're noisy, ugly and they need to be cleaned every day without fail, that's just normal commercial equipment.
I decided to try paying much more for a Fellow Stagg EKG, and it was a great decision. It’s lasted over 3 years and has been an absolute joy to use compared to the prior mass market garbage.
I often wish for a Wirecutter-like site that prioritizes quality and especially longevity above all else. Wirecutter always focused too much on cost, and even their “upgrade picks” tend to suffer awful quality issues. For years their top blender pick was an Oster that had hundreds of angry reviews about dying within months. Wirecutter ignored the feedback for years despite so many people streaming into their own comments section to vent about it.
When I bought my house I finally said "screw it, let's see what decent appliances look like".
Japanese rice cooker set me back $95 and I thought I would never hear the end of it, and after 4 years, it had already paid itself off (we were doing $14 rice cookers every 6 months). Air fryer was $70 but the previous $40 only lasted 13 months. Basic coffee maker was like $60 but made non-burnt coffee. A little combo oven/toaster is what I ended up on since we had one in the last apartment since we never used a full oven.
The ones that are honestly pretty difficult to find were dishwasher but one of our friends suggested bosch because we wanted a quiet appliance.
When I was young, almost everything I owned was the cheapest possible version of that thing. Everything just kind of sucked, brutally cost-optimized to the point of being somewhat nasty to use and barely functional.
I was still very fortunate: I had food to eat, clothes, etc. A lot of kids in the world would have traded places with me.
Now that I'm older, I have no interest in "luxury" goods, but there's that subtle intangible benefit to using e.g. the $95 rice cooker vs. the $14 rice cooker. You feel like somebody who's worth more than the cheapest possible piece of disposable shit, I guess. Or at least I do.
It makes better rice, too, of course. And there's the ecological benefit of not tossing a $14 rice cooker into the landfill every couple of months. But there's also a bit of self worth involved, or something.
It's not super fancy or anything but it fills that rice craving and is a multi-use device.
I make rice in a saucepan on the range top. I have to come back and turn it off when it's done. Otherwise, it is the same. If you care about how good your rice is, you are starting with short-grain rice. Or red, or black, or arborio for risotto.
I grew up with Zojirushi rice cookers. They always worked. The last one I bought sputtered starch water all over the counter. Stuff you can buy in the US today is not the same as what we could buy even 20 years ago.
I bought them off Amazon, do sourcing isn’t difficult, but some research might be in order if you want Japanese manufacturing. You’ll pay more for these models as well — they aren’t the cheap or maybe even middle-priced options... (I believe my rice cooker was nearly $300, 5 or so years ago...)
We've been very happy with our Bosch. Don't ever buy a cheap dishwasher.
The only real difference above $400 is how loud it is. In a silent room you can't tell whether the $1200 dishwasher is running at all.
That does not matter to everybody.
In addition to their testing process itself, they actually dogfood their advice by using their own picks in their test kitchen so they get used by tons of people way more often than any testing process could accomplish so they can get a real sense of how good a recommendation holds up over time.