The reasons everyone has a fridge today isn’t because everyone is rich, it’s because fridges are cheap.
Two things that _are_ real issues are
- Compensation includes benefits, and much of the increase in compensation has been eaten up by healthcare costs. This means wages haven't increased nearly as much.
- There is a growing gap in productivity inequality within labor which has led to growing income inequality. Those productivity and income increases have disproportionately gone to the upper percentiles of workers.
This goes counter to what I have read. For example: "Net productivity grew 59.7% from 1979-2019 while a typical worker’s compensation grew by 15.8%, according to EPI data..."
https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
- The productivity and compensation graphs are often inflation-adjusted using incomparable deflators. Productivity is measured using a GDP inflator (which includes investments) whereas compensation is measured using a CPI deflator (which only includes consumer products). CPI is historically higher[1] which means compensation is artificially being deflated more than productivity.
- The most well-known graph from the EPI[2] shows productivity for all workers but shows compensation for only 80% of workers, with the provided reason being to exclude high earners like management and executives. Which, sure I guess, but surely the two metrics should be kept consistent.
If you correct for these errors you end up finding a productivity/compensation gap that is much smaller than the EPI claims, though notably not zero. The EPI themselves have a figure that includes all workers and uses matching deflators ([3], figure C, "Real producer average hourly consumption") so perhaps some of the blame here is on readers.
I think this BLS paper on the subject[4] is well worth a read. An interesting result they found is that the industry with the greatest productivity/compensation gap is...computing. Probably not the jobs people usually imagine when they think of stagnating pay.
1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/comparing-the-cpi-...
2. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
3. https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
4. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...
Start making quality appliances that work, are serviceable and affordable (maybe financing?). There seems to be a market and I think lots of people would be happy to work in an American factory making quality stuff for American homes.
This tongue-in-cheek comment is inspired by relatives who actually have two kitchens: One in the house with the store and manufacturing space (with space for 6 people to eat), one in the house they live in (and about twice as big, with no sitting space). The former is used all the time (often it's "the boss" cooking for the employees and visitors), and the other one, well... she said they don't actually need it, but he enjoys cooking a lot and is really good at it, so a spacious and nice kitchen was his treat for their successful store (it happens to look representative as well, but the purpose is actual cooking).
If your competition makes a shitty fridge for $1000 with bearing that will fail at 15 years on average, and you make the exact same thing with bearings that will last 30 years for $1010, most people will look at the exterior, say “these look the same”, and buy the competitors model.
And you can advertise that all you want, and next week your competition will put $3 of extra steel in the door handle to make it feel more solid than yours and write the word “professional” on the door. Now your product looks like a bad deal.
Now you might say that people are making bad decisions. But are they really? Most Americans don’t keep their house for 30 years, so why do they care if the fridge fails before then? It’s someone else’s problem.
This is why market positioning is a complicated discipline. It isn’t just “make a good thing for a good price”
I am keen to research stuff online more. I avoided buying the more expensive "Zip" water system, and instead got a RO system and my own chiller. An RO system is mostly plastic and pipes, with most of the $ going into the cartridges. So good value for money. Ugly... but it is under your sink so who cares.
It was cheaper (about 1/3 of the price all up), and all the Zip users bemoan how unreliable it is. I also remember anecdotally how many times I have seen an out of order tap of theirs in an office or other place. They also don't filter quite as well as an RO (but they do filter well enough if taste is the concern).
You don't always get better buy paying more, or going with the famous brand. I think you have to research all the things.
If you really want something engineered differently, you need to look at something where cost is not prioritized, which won’t be something that costs 20% more, or even 100% more. It’ll probably cost at least an order of magnitude more at least.