Microblog Memes

This is my mother in law to a tee, she buys second hand washing machines on craigslist for $100 - 200 they last about a year and she buys a new one. Always complaining about "planned obsolescence". I keep telling her "no one is selling a good used washing machine, they had problems with it and got a new one" Meanwhile she criticizes me for spending $700 on a washing machine we have had for 10 years now.

She has a saying "poor people have poor ways" which she thinks means that when your poor you work with what you have, I have told her it is an insult that means poor people are poor because of their actions and decisions.

I'm not saying it is the case in your situation but sometimes very old appliances are so inefficient that it makes sense to replace them on energy savings alone, we had a fridge that I put a meter on to see what it cost us to run, it was a little over $100 more per year then the larger one I was thinking of buying So if this new one lasts 10 years or so it will have paid for itself.

That's dumb design.

• they are often "cheaper" then what you would have paid in the 80s and they are built to that price
• they are more efficient, which means every thing has tighter tolerances and thus more likely to break
• they are more complicated due to the above which means more to break
• with the above efficiently they use way less water but in my experience that means they clean worse

I need my FBI guy to know that I have clean clothes for work in the morning.

The old order Amish are still using the 1940s Maytag wringer washers. They convert them to gas engines and run the exhaust outside.

I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge because I asked the repair guy to replace it with better quality than it originally came with, and he used a commercial (as opposed to residential) grade compressor that was three times the price

But aside from a short lifetime, the big problem with cheap AC motors is they're imprecisely built and often waste more electricity as heat and noise than they put into their output shaft

Of course even with the better stuff there still "cot death" where a new product fails almost immediately (because noone tests their products), but at least those failures are under warranty, the cheap motors typically last at least a few years

This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won't countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.

Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone's moronic preconceptions about what a product "ought" to cost. This isn't just a capitalist greed thing, although it's certainly that, too -- corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it'll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they'll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they'd happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they're all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.

You can also buy really good machines that last forever, you just have to pay a lot more. To me it seems the guy complaining just buys the cheapest washing machine build and delivered by slave workes from Amazon