Have Appliances Declined in Durability?

This raised some interesting arguments to think about for a bit, but I think it tried too hard to be contrarian and clever and in the end I just got angry.

Wirecutter, for example, uses data from "the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers", not exactly an unbiased group, to argue about appliance longevity. And the Baumol effect, while probably real, might just as well reflect planned obsolescence as much as it causes replacement — it's a common criticism that units aren't made to be repaired, which means the repair costs go up because the parts are functionally unrepairable. It's a moot point whether something theoretically could be repaired if it can't be in practice — it's less repairable, and therefore less durable, either way.

The MR piece on clothing durability is similarly hand-wavy, to the point I kind of wonder what its motives were. It confuses durability with functional performance (you can have a modern raincoat that performs really well as a raincoat but doesn't last very long), and is haphazard in pointing to numbers without acknowledging the bigger picture. It acknowledges denim has declined in weight from 13-16oz to 9-11 oz/y, which is pretty big, but then seems to minimize this, without acknowledging the harder-to-quantify things like declines in fabric quality independent of density, like staple length or manufacturing quality, or substituting long staple virgin wool with low quality short-staple wool-nylon blends, etc. etc. It then seemingly proceeds to argue that because you can get some high quality products somewhere (the discussion of Filson was particularly ironic), the entire market system is intact and functioning as it should.

One of the arguments I've been making for years is that products in many categories have degraded so much over time, that current consumers and critics don't even know how to evaluate product quality relative to the past. In other words, they don't even know what they're missing, and in some cases, are actively misled to evaluate products on superficial characteristics that reinforce short-term immediate impressions, even leading to perceptions of markers of quality as negative.

I guess I felt like both of these pieces really superficially treated a lot of complicated supply-consumer decision making dynamics over time for the sake of trying to be clever, and in the process did more harm than good. There are some areas where product quality has increased (cars, for example), but these pieces were not about those.

Yes they have. The thickness of steel as inner/outer walls. The mass of motors and their internal copper has been cut by the use of far higher frequencies of alternating current often generated via pulse width modulation up to 50-200 Khz. The use of glues to fasten, foam to insulate and of course the planned life of 4-8 years. They are made to throw away, with no economic repair path as the labor cost plus parts often exceeds a new machine - it can take 3-4 hours of service labor to answer a call, arrange to view, use the embedded diagnostics to ID the fault and look up the parts cost = quote the client with the trip to inspect cost, plus the inflated parts cost plus another 3-4 to go fix. All these labor hours are costed at $75-125 per hour = zero economic way to fix

Yes they have.

Take washing machine drum bearings.

you used to be able to remove the drum and install a new bearing without any problems.

The bearing was usually in an external housing so rarely deteriorated.

In modern machines the drum bearing is inside the drum leaving it to the mercy of living in continual water and detergents.

The one very small pathetic rubber seal hardens over a short period of time. The bearing dries out, no more grease, rust develops, leaving an extremely loud washing machine that sounds like a 747 taking off.

you cannot replace the bearing.