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Good vid but he’s falling a bit for the corporate propaganda that costs determine prices and that consumers have real power over price setting. Most firms maximize prices while minimizing costs. Consumers have especially little market power in a consolidated market like home appliances.
I haven’t watched this video, but based on your comment I don’t think I’ll bother.
It is my sincere understanding that the degradation of quality is from the companies trying to leverage extended warranties as the true profit center of appliances.
edit: I should add in more detail. Sorry Avid, not trying to converse “around” you, it’s just meant to inform other’s on how I come to think this way.
The shit really hit the fan for quality when Maytag/Whirlpool bought Amana and restructured. They closed most of their manufacturing and consolidated. Really this meant that for all the “banners” or “brands” that various machines were sold under in the various stores, now for the most part they were all the exact same machines, literally made in the same plants, same pumps, elements, controllers, you get the picture. The drop in quality was precipitous from this point.
Oh, and Haier was trying to purchase either Amana or Whirlpool, can’t remember which. But at any rate Haier was in the game walking the dog on consumers as well. Samsung, who had absolutely no fucking business making appliances, then jumped hard into the game because they’re a major competitor. Businesses playing shell games and strategically competing.
All of this dovetailed with the larger industry-wide push to embrace the “extended warranty” profit stream. Companies everywhere were figuring out that the money was flowing like water with this scam. This slowly evolved into a quasi-subscription type business model where they are now designed and expected to fail in a specific time frame. Circuit boards by steam vents, changing key components to aluminum which corrodes. That type of obvious bullshit.
I think now they’ve got us by the nut sack. Buying an EW is almost automatic at this point. Nobody thinks for a second that their device is going to hit 18 months without a major malfunction.
They’ve managed to turn buying a washing machine into a Vegas Hotel type situation where the up front price is $47 but in the forensic accounting you’re paying $160.
It’s still informative. His other stuff is good too.
I’m not condemning the person I haven’t watched.
But I don’t need a 41 minute video that sounds like he just expounds personal opinions and is not really meritorious.
I follow this stuff, I have for 30 plus years.
If he didn’t heavily focus on extended warranties, he’s in the weeds.
And I see no evidence from what people are discussing here that he clues in on that.
He has other videos where he has explained that you can’t trust any brand any longer and you should not buy based on previous brand experiences alone but investigate individual models (and even revisions to them since it was a known trick to change them after the initial release to make them cheaper). Not sure if he mentioned it on this video since at the moment I’m not in the market for an appliance, but his takes seemed reasonable.
Yup. I opted for mininally computerized Whirlpool based on some of his stuff in 2020. Mainly because they’re simple and there’s plenty of parts and repair people who can fix them in Canada.
planned obsolescence (pretty much the cause of so much crap)
Add feature creep, so there’s more things to go wrong and there’s higher chances of something breaking.
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.”
From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
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
Yeah I’m tempted to go for commercial appliances just to ensure I have more dumb options and quality.
Watching Technology Connections recent final (probably not final) video on dishwashers made me really want an open source dishwasher where you can program your own cycles. Maybe over the next few years hacking appliances will become common, doing what Valetudo has done for robot vacuums.
