I only have very low end flash drives (like the free ones you get at trade shows) fail on me. None of the decent ones I've bought (Kingston, generally) ever failed. I still have my various 4G, 8G, 16G, 32G drives I've bought along the years, all still work fine.
The only one that failed were used continuously plugged, or to write a lot (like recording audio), and very low-end with that.