#politics #cost-disease #capitalism #widgets #misc #planned-obsolescence #economics

Do you know there's a lightbulb that's been burning for 100 years?

It used to be that if you built appliances, you could do a damn good job. Take pride in your work, throw in a lifetime guarantee.

Craftsman did it! Zippo did it!

But there's a problem.

If I sell you a vacuum that lasts for 60 years, and everyone buys one, now I can't sell anymore vacuums.

So I sell vacuum maintenance. But even then, you only need maintenance every so often. I don't get repeat customers if I sell high quality appliances.

And so I go out of business. And I have nothing to pass down to my family.

So I either raise my prices or make worse vacuums. If I raise them too much, some people can't afford them. They'll buy cheaper, worse vacuums. Those vacuums will break, and they'll buy them more often. And I'm out of business.

Or I make cheap, crappy vacuums and depend on repeat business and everything slowly gets worse and we end up with a world full of grandpas complaining that back in my day, you'd buy a vacuum from Charlie and you'd have it for 60 years, or give it to your son when he's old enough, and now everything's gotten worse.

And he's right.

See Also

Samuel Vimes Boot Theory Of Economics

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness

u/MalificViper on Planned Obsolescence:

I'm an appliance repair tech. It's not all bias. There's been a lot of switches from durable AC motors to cheapo DC motors, compressor windings aren't as good, the amount of copper gets shaved down, more plastic parts are included, belts are thinner, and so on.

The cost of a washer and dryer from the 70's is like 4 grand adjusted for inflation though.

Basically these appliances commanded prestige prices, and you can't expect a $50 blender to last an entire lifetime.