Microblog Memes

Damn. So if you have money, you get decent products. Thanks for the great reminder.

This is my mother in law to a tee, she buys second hand washing machines on craigslist for $100 - 200 they last about a year and she buys a new one. Always complaining about "planned obsolescence". I keep telling her "no one is selling a good used washing machine, they had problems with it and got a new one" Meanwhile she criticizes me for spending $700 on a washing machine we have had for 10 years now.

She has a saying "poor people have poor ways" which she thinks means that when your poor you work with what you have, I have told her it is an insult that means poor people are poor because of their actions and decisions.

One of these days I hope to eventually own a home. When I do, I want to buy one of the industrial-ass washing machines and dryers they use in laundromat and hotels. I'm sure it will be very expensive, but I firmly believe in "buy once, cry once". I want a laundry machine that is built to run 24/7 for 10+ years. Used at a personal pace, it should last forever.

Pretty sure this is true for all modern washers, ours is top load and it says leave door open when not in use.

The old order Amish are still using the 1940s Maytag wringer washers. They convert them to gas engines and run the exhaust outside.

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.

• they are often "cheaper" then what you would have paid in the 80s and they are built to that price
• they are more efficient, which means every thing has tighter tolerances and thus more likely to break
• they are more complicated due to the above which means more to break
• with the above efficiently they use way less water but in my experience that means they clean worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory applies...

A Speed Queen set sure would be nice to have.

This is not the case. Washers used to be more expensive as a proportion of median income back then. According to this page a new Kenmore washer cost $289 in 1980. The median family income in 1980 was $21,023, so a new washer would cost 1.37% of a family's annual income. Compare to now, where the median household income is $83,150. As a proportion of median income, a $289 washer in 1980 would cost about $1500 today, which is about what a durable, well made washer with a 7 year warranty costs. Manufactured goods were largely more expensive compared to wages in the past.

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.

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.

Wifi is there to avoid pressing the capacitive buttons.

"And for some reason it has Wi-Fi ." will be the last line in humanity's epitaph.