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I literally have clothes hanging on a line across the living room because our just out of warranty $1,000+ Samsung “smart dryer” died again a month after I replaced every sensor and the heating element, and I just don’t feel like taking it apart again to “maybe” find the problem.
Before this we just had a plain white box from Maytag; easy to work on, cheap replacement parts. It was probably 30 years old when the motor seized and my wife asked for newer, fancier machines. Big mistake.
We have similar ‘smart’ Samsung washer and dryers that we purchased last year after our old Kenmore units bit the dust after many many years.
I am quick to warn anyone that I come across DO NOT buy Samsung machines under any circumstance.
Our wash times (and dry but especially wash) went up from astronomically. Even though the load size was supposed to be one of the largest we could find it no where near compares to what we had. Plus, a month or so after we had ours we received a notification from Samsung that they needed to log into our washer and do a ‘firmware’ update because several of those models were causing fires.
Imagine your washing machine causing a fucking fire and burning your house down.
And the fix is a firmware update not a total recall? So its either buggy overcomplicated software or the update tweaked things to reduce the power draw so you got less machine power than what you were advertised.
Which honestly for a washer machine is pretty cool they can fix that sort of issue without the hassle of replacing the big machine, but if only these kinds of major safety issues could be figured out in pre-production.
From my memories, the price of appliances haven’t changed much in the last couple of decades. They maintain or increase margins with cheaper parts, less QA, looser performance tolerances while keeping the same sticker price. Whatever the quality sacrifice equivalent word for shrinkflation
Enshittification, just like with online services.
Enshittification means something more specific than just making a thing worse. It means making it worse in a way designed to exploit or take advantage of the user by stealing their personal information or something like that.
This is more like “value engineering” and “planned obsolescence.”
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More than that, it is the need to continually sell appliances. If you care to build to last (and we still know how to do it) then in the next quarter you sells will go down, the profit will go down and the board will go down.
planned obsolescence (pretty much the cause of so much crap)
We had a fridge that was manufactured in 1998 that lasted until November of last year when it failed irreparably. We replaced it, and 13 months later, 2 days before thanksgiving, our new fridge failed. It was like pulling teeth to get the warranty servicer to get it repaired.
Repairman finally figured out what was wrong with it yesterday, replaced the seized up defroster and it’s running again.
That’s still so ridiculous for an appliance to break that early in its lifetime.
I watched a good video on tool quality.
It basically said the exact same old tool is better than the new tool now. But the new tool is priced much much less. When they compared it to a modern tool that was the same price or less it performed the same or better.
People just want cheap things and companies want to make money. People need to buy quality and companies will get an incentive to build quality.
That was also the conclusion of this video on the Speed channel for older version of things vs new one (included tools, shoes/undershirts, etc - I would ignore consumables that expire but they were there for s&g it seems):
The problem is it’s not really people’s choice. Companies have gotten very good at disguising quality tradoffs and marketing has got very good at muddying the waters.
Since this is about tools, I’ll bring up Craftsman as an example. For many years, it was a quality brand accessible to homeowners. But as they changed to be cheaper they still marketed themselves as a quality brand and they seemed like the same price. It was only after the brand value was destroyed, that it became clear how “cheap” the tools had become and people were able to make a legitimate decision to move on
The problem is trust.
People don’t pay for the expensive (allegedly better) stuff because the customer assumes with great chances of being correct that the sales person doesn’t know shit, is lying to their face, and will not honor any of their words after you pay.
Customers don’t trust. So if you know that you are getting crap anyway, you better get cheap crap.
Then the corporate analysis interprets that pattern as “oh, the customer does not value quality, they just want cheap crap, let’s keep doing cheap crap”
Yeah I’m tempted to go for commercial appliances just to ensure I have more dumb options and quality.
