Porteus mills in the uk made such a good product they went out of business in the 1970s. And their mills are still used in the vast majority of distilleries in Scotland.
Me when I have no idea how capitalism works lmao
Most home appliances can be repaired even yet today. They all still work on the same principles that they did 60 years ago. Sure, the mechanical timers, switches and simple single phase motors have been replaced with solid state control boards, touch switches, and 3 phase motors, but those are also simpler to replace, if a bit harder to diagnose. The parts are a mere goggle away and for sale to even to the likes of me. About the only ‘impossible’ to repair at home appliance is your refrigerator. And that’s because of the sealed nature of the cooling system.
The biggest issue isn’t that they can’t be repaired, but rather you can’t be bothered to. You would rather spend $1000+ to get a new washing machine delivered to your house than spend $500 to fix the old one. You might consider fixing the old one if it would only cost $50 total and if the pump wasn’t $300+ labor and a $100 just to get a repairman to knock on your door. Plus the probable wait for a week or two to get the part. And you sure as hell ain’t going to get your fingers dirty or your knuckles skinned to do it yourself.
I’m still shaving with the same Gillette Slim Adjustable razor I learned to shave with as a youngster. It cost me about $10 in the early 1970s. The blades still only cost me about 15 cents per blade. I’ve had that razor for longer than I’ve been married to my wife of 40 years. I doubt few of you here would be able to make that kind of commitment to a simple razor, let alone a dishwasher.
That’s a horrible plan for a start-up.
How do your investors cash out?
Great idea! Horrible for sales though. Plus no shareholder would wanna touch it with a 10-foot pole when they hear “customers first”
This is why you don’t do shareholders!
And stay small lol. I hate the corporate world (i work in it) but it is what it is
in 2005ish, I went to Sears and picked up the most expensive bag vacuum. I think it was an elite something. 20 years later, I had to change out the hose once because I dropped it down the stairs and its been amazing.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price. Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
I think the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness plays a part as well:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … 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. … 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 socio-economic unfairness.
As the saying goes, it is expensive to be poor.
If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.
There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.
So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.
Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.
This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.
Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.
There are also different standards when you care about the environment. Old school fridges used incredibly bad greenhouse gasses (R22 and R142B) and were significantly less efficient using approximately $250 MORE energy per year than a modern fridge (1750 kWh vs 450kwh) so only factoring in your electricity bill you could buy a $2500 fridge every 10 years and break even and if you got a cheaper fridge like a whirlpool you could get a new one every 5 years for 50 years
Don’t get me wrong there is still planned obsolescence but a lot of the older designs aren’t as perfect as people like to remember them being
I love buy nice or buy twice. I think Harbor freight gets a pass though.
The second buy can even be the nice one. If you’re unsure how much use the tool will get, buy cheap then upgrade after it breaks.
So, this is TOTALLY doable with two caveats:
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For most things, you’re going to need a variance on high-efficiency and pollution laws. Those old appliances weren’t sipping water and electricity, and their refrigeration cycles threw out tons of waste heat and used refrigerants that were super rough on the atmosphere.
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They’re going to cost 3 times as much as a current appliance. Those heavy metal fridges were expensive back in the day, they were equialent to thousands of dollars today with shitty freezers and manual defrosting. Cast metal and shipping are disproportionately more expensive than the used to be.
Optimize builds and manufacture after a order is made could work. Would be even more expensive.
Sell them uncharged. Up to the user to find the freeon.
or… art?
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We need a buyitforlife… Sublemmy? I forget the term
i think it’s just called a community but someone correct me if i’m wrong
That’s correct.
Mostly survivorship bias
and uses four times the electricity and substances that have been banned since the 80s
…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.
…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.
…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.
And killing americans because it doesn’t have enough warning labels.
“Does not grant you the ability to fly”
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
You do see how many mother fuckers are around now a days?
Mmm asbestos
Worry not, some of what’s perfectly fine nowadays will eventually be forbidden because how harmful it is for people, from micro-plastics that are being found even in men’s gonads to the excessive amounts of nitrous oxides emitted by diesel engine that kill over ten thousand people per year in Europe alone.
We probably still breathe and eat a lot of highly carcinogenic shit, just different shit from back in the days when asbestos was considered a great fire-proof substance.
Mmm ya and give me some lead to go with that asbestos please. Best combo
Get that asbestos, lead, microplastics trifecta in ya. You could be unstoppable!
Banning CFCs was the biggest hit to long-lasting, efficient AC and refrigeration.
It was also critical to stopping the complete removal of the fucking ozone layer.
That’s not to say we couldn’t build a lot more stuff without obsolescence fuses, unrepairable designs, and trickling out features to force unnecessary replacement.
And require regular matinence and still fail
It’s like any other luxury.
Back in 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour. You could get a meal at a diner for under $1.00 or go to a really swanky place and spend $4.00 or $5.00.
Today, minimum wage is $7.50, a diner meal is $20.00, and a luxury meal is $100.00
You can go out a find a really well build product that will last, but it will cost ten times as much as the one you can afford.
This is true for some products but absolutely the opposite for many others. You can go buy a $500 jacket that will outlive you but good luck finding a car or fridge that won’t break, especially the high end models with all the bells and whistles. Samsung will happily sell you a $5k fridge that has dozens of features that will break and require servicing far more frequently than the $500 white apartment fridge.
Counter point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Counter-counter point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint
Count pointer:
That’s actually the counter counter
Count Pointers:
Count Pointer:
*p++;
Contra Points:
Happy cake day
3
:3
I don’t think that’s relevant to this post. They aren’t saying that they want to recreate every old patented appliance. I am sure they would be cherry picking just the best ones from that era.
There are good appliances being made now. They’re just much more expensive than the cheap and “midrange” which is usually the cheap stuff with a coat of paint.
Or it’s just the cheap stuff with more “features”, so it actually breaks faster.
Guess how much its gonna cost
62€50
That would be relevant if we had no idea why the device broke down. In a plane shot down we can assume it was hit in a place that is critical to flight. We don’t know what took it down. We know the 5 year old fridge is not working because a $3 thermostat has stopped working but the part is not available and the computer onboard will not accept a generic one off the shelf.
This is the approach galanz did I think except the shitiest patents modernized.
Would a company like that go out of business from not selling the same shit to people over and over?
Why do we expect companies to stay in business forever?
There’s no reason you couldn’t make a company, sell good, solid, long-lasting products at a fair profit, and then shut the company down when you run out of buyers.
Except that’s not the capitalist model. A company with an expiration date defies the core capitalist value of growth at any cost. Planned obsolescence is only for products, not companies.
They can sell easily replaceable components that will break down no matter how well built the appliance is.
If I made a toaster that costs $50 but every 5 years you replace the coil for $5.
Or one that costs $20 but you need to replace every 5 years.
You can imagine people going for the 2nd one.
Shit I was thinking more fridge or washing machine, things that costs thousands. I had 3 microwaves at one point in my life. Those I’m fine just buying again.
Porteus mills made such a good product they went out of business.
