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Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that's like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don't because the shitty one costs less than half of that.
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.
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
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
Problem is you can't trust anything. The fancy $2k machine might just be fancy in name. You don't know if stuff is good before it starts not being. And reviews don't help, because they won't test a product for 5 years to check durability before posting
The speed queen I mentioned comes with a 7 year warranty and they're the brand used by laundromats who need them to be reliable to make money. That said, the consumer grade ones are not as solidly built as the commercial units, but that's because nobody is going to put laundromat levels of abuse on their home washing machine.
You know the funny thing?
You can still buy appliances that last and have good service.
But you don't earn enough to afford them, like your parents did.
Meh. Buy them second hand. Not even joking. As you said, good one last forever. while there's a bit of a logistics difficulty with second hand large appliances, you can also just rent a van for the day and ask a friend for help.
Problem is you don't know how well it was maintained /cared for by its former owner.
Similar story for clothes dryers:
My parents' dryer had 2 knobs for temperature and run time, and a start button. Ran forever and dried clothes.
My dryer has like a dozen programmed cycles that rely on a moisture sensor that doesn't work and leaves clothes damp unless you use the manual time & temp settings, which takes several capacitive button presses on a circuit board that is likely to die before any of the actual mechanical components of the dryer. Also for some reason it has Wi-Fi.
"And for some reason it has Wi-Fi ." will be the last line in humanity's epitaph.
The latest xkcd has one of my favorite hover texts of all time:
It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
Why are appliances shit nowadays >:( i bought a house with 20-30 year old appliances that work fine, but decided to start upgrading so I bought a new washer and dryer. The new machines dont work nearly as well and I know they're not going to last even 10 years. We're already having issues with them 4 months later.
I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
This was unironically Maytag, they enshitified with the rest. The Maytag man was a real thing.
Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.
Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.
It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque ~brush~ cleaner
There are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods
You always have to leave the door open...
I picked this up from my parents.
When I moved out, I lived with a flatmate for a few years and I left the washing machine door open after using it and my flatmate closed it.
I explained to her why I left it open and she just stared back at me. Not once had she ever thought of this and said it made so much sense. She is about 20 years my senior.
Certain habits seem to be so obvious, but unless handed down, someone may never even think of it.
Reminds me of that guy that never thought to let the shower water get warm before stepping in.
Should’a bought a Speed Queen
I've repaired a few dryers, the new ones have the same aluminium drum like you would expect but for some godforsaken reason they're allowed to mount that drum in place on a plastic ring. The dial components and thermostats used to safely operate the heating elements are also much smaller, which is problematic given that gives them less capacitance for high voltage and heat causing them to fail easier.
But worst of all is that when they fail, not if but when, you can't just take the dial off and file the corrosion off the metal contacts, you have to order an entirely new board completely if they offer it at all. You can't just open the top and front panel with a few screws to take the drum out and do repairs, you have to unscrew every panel in order and detatch them from the additional internal chassis, and you're gonna need like 7 fucking arms to put the damn thing back together.
If I were in charge, these sort of blatant obsolences would be punishable with extradition and federal prison.
This is like that fridge post from yesterday..
The difference is that...cheap washing machines didn't exist. Good modern washing machines last a long time while not wasting money and electricity.
You can't compare the only available appliances of the 70s to the bottom-of-the-barrel now
No. That's not what's happening here.
And just for the record I am an appliance repair tech for the last 20 years.
Hands down appliances from the early 90s to about the 2010s are significantly better than new appliances today.
They are better in everyway. They were made under a different philosophy, they were made to be fixed.
When I stated my career in 2004 I would have a box of common parts that would break for each kind of appliance I would service. Fridge, washer, dryer ext. I wouldn't have to order a part for weeks. I would just drive down to the parts supplier stock up and move on to my next work order. Now all I do is order proprietary parts that are dedicated to one specific model number.
The materials and build quality of older appliances far exceeds that of new ones so much so that I am actually recommending to my clients that they try to find a used appliance rather than buy a new one because it'll probably last longer.
And I've had this argument so many times already on this platform the savings on energy are absolutely negligible. They can easily be ignored. To clarify the way they notate change in energy is by percentages so it'll appear that an appliance is saving 70% more energy but in reality that saving is stretched across 365 days which equates to maybe 25 to 30 cents of savings a day. Or it'll look like you're saving 400 kilowatt hours but again stretched across 365 days that's just over 1 kilowatt hour a day.
The only caveat is the fact that washers use less water which can actually turn into some kind of savings over the course of the year because your water heater will have to heat less water but that's about it.
Generally I fix appliances that are less than 10 years old most of those are refrigerators the extreme vast majority of those are Samsung appliances.
Not a repair tech, but this matches my experience maintaining and repairing my appliances. My early 80s whirlpool range and oven have had small issues here and there, but generally require swapping one part hidden behind some screws and will take under an hour. My Samsung dishwasher not only does a piss poor job, it also throws LC codes every few days. After the fourth time pulling it from the cabinet I had to put a series of shims to lift the leak sensor off the drip tray and buy a separate Wi-Fi moisture detector. My Samsung fridge (4yo) has a broken door ice dispenser and intermittently decides not to dispense water too. Old LG unit had a linear compressor that shit the bed three times before they refused to do any more warranty work on it.
Spend a little more and get yourself a speed queen top loader and never replace it again.
But also … my Maytag (same brand as my parents that came with the house that was built in 82) high efficiency front loader has been reliable af too.
Just don’t get a washer from a brand that is just a tech brand that now makes washers.
I'm so thankful my house came with a super old washer and dryer. They work so well. I had to replace the one vent hose thing for the dryer, but that's because my cat thought she could sit on it and it ripped out of the wall when she landed on it.
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.
Requires wifi. Sends gigs of data back to the manufacturer everyday. But it has pretty chime.
The washer and dryer at my mom's are 30 years old. She's had repairmen laugh at her for having them, but they're much better made than anything new.
Newer machines are several times more water and energy efficient.
Still nice that they lasted long and were easier to repair.
More water and energy efficient to run, yes. If you have to replace them every couple of years the resources used to make new ones need to be included too though, and that will have a big impact on the comparison. That said, I have had a modern front load pair for at least 5 years now, no issues.
Buy European: Miele, Rex Electrolux, Beko (Turkish, don't get into that), Smeg, Candy, AEG, etc...
Don't want to jinx it, but my Electrolux washer-dryier is 7 years old and still like new, despite being relatively cheap and despite combined machines being more problematic.
If your clothing washer stinks, run it on hot with just bleach inside it, like put in a bit too much bleach, no clothing