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.
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.
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.
Samsung appliances have been like this for a while. I got a Samsung dryer in 2015 and it is by far the biggest piece of crap I have ever used. Thankfully I’m good at repairing appliances but this was a next level piece of crap. It was constantly wearing out drum rollers, belts, belt tensioners, and other parts. I was having to repair it almost on a yearly basis. I ended up just stocking a bunch of parts in a cabinet in the laundry room so when it failed I was able to fix it the same day. There are some 3rd party parts kids where they provide upgraded parts that seem to last longer. The drum rollers and belt tensioner pulley use low quality bushings that I upgraded to a 3rd party ball bearing parts and that made a big difference in reliability. I gave it to my mom and warned her about the issues with it and stocked her up on parts so anytime she has an issue she calls me and I can repair it the same day. Thankfully it’s not too difficult to work on.
A friend of mine got an entire Samsung appliance package and he dreads that decision every day. He hates his fridge, dishwasher, washer, and dryer.
Years ago I got two Bosch dishwashers and those have been great. Only minor repairs like replacement spray arms and a replacement rack glide have been needed on those. Otherwise they have been solid units and have fantastic performance.
A few years ago I got a GE combo washer/heat pump unit and it is definitely more convenient than separate units but it does have some flaws. The drain pump filter needs more maintenance than a typical unit. Some of the gunk gets past the drain filter and has caused the drain pump to clog. The dryer filter lets some lint past which causes the evaporator coil to clog somewhat over time. Cleaning the evaporator is difficult as access is quite limited so I had to buy some special long reach cleaning brushes and vacuum attachments. Sometimes the door doesn’t unlock when it’s supposed to because of a firmware issue. And lastly it causes more wrinkles in clothes than a conventional dryer.
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.
I don’t keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it’s always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.
I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.
I’m actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don’t stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function’s power/capacity, then I’ll probably go for it.
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.
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.
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.”
Interestingly, Cory Doctrow just said in a verge podcast episode that he loves to see enshittification applied as broadly as possible because it raises awareness and gets people talking
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.
Yeah I’m tempted to go for commercial appliances just to ensure I have more dumb options and quality.
Capitalism.
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.
