Comment on Samsung brings ads to US fridges
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 1 week agoThat’s just survivorship bias. You can absolutely still get reliable appliances that are cheap to repair. I’ve had to replace a few parts on my Maytag dryer (because my wife abuses it), and I only paid like $30 for a coil assembly and replacement sensors. My washer is still going strong after 10 years.
They’re often expensive, but so were reliable appliances in the good ol days. The main problem is that people want relatively cheap stuff, and that cheap stuff is made with cheap parts that don’t last as long.
Appliances used to be major purchases, and the modern consumer wants a cheap new appliance now instead of saving up for months.
grue@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s a problem, but these days the new problem is that even the expensive stuff is often still cheaply made and just dressed up with “premium” features and styling (that’s also cheap to implement, but artificially withheld from the lower-end models to punish people who pay less).
If you look hard enough, yes, but the other issue is that the shit I described above sells for the same price as quality but costs less to make, which means the glorified trash is more profitable. Even when companies care about their long-term reputation and don’t succumb to that pressure to enshittify, they’ll be out-competed by those that do and eventually go bankrupt or get bought out by private equity and forced to do it anyway. The market is littered with examples of companies that had great reputations for “buy it for life” products, until all of a sudden they didn’t anymore.