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.
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.
Ah yes, the Sam Vimes’ boots theory
Nope, totally different.
Look at the price of Super Bowl tickets.
First Bowl tickets were $10.00. This year they were going for $6,000.00
Top luxury car in 1960 was $7,500.00 for a sports car and $35,000.00 for a Rolls or Bentley. Most expensive car today is $30 million.
The rich have gotten much, much richer and ‘need’ to spend more so people will notice.
That’s how you can tell Discworld is a work of fiction. It has rich people that are actually sensible about their wealth
In “The Stars My Destination” Alfred Bester wrote that conspicuous consumption was the basis of all civilization
I agree with your larger point, but I think the super bowl comparison is poor. Popularity has changed so ticket prices will have gone up. The first Super Bowl is not what it is today. The luxury car example was a much better like-for-like comparison.
Err no, minimum wage is 13,90€
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.
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
That’s a horrible plan for a start-up.
How do your investors cash out?
We need a buyitforlife… Sublemmy? I forget the term
Brother there are five
i think it’s just called a community but someone correct me if i’m wrong
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.
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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Here’s a lovely british fridge from the 50’s: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/R2K1Y1/original-1950s-vintage-old-print-advertisement-from-english-magazine-advertising-frigidaire-refrigerator-circa-1954-R2K1Y1.jpg
the larger, budget model (250 liters, so about 2/3rd of a current single-door basic fridge) is 152 guineas. For those of you not usally paying in pre-decimal british currency, that’s 152 pounds and 152 shillings or 159,60 decimal pounds. Inflation from 1955 makes that about 2000 pounds/dollar/euros today.
No auto-defrost, no actually closing door, and a barely-adequate temperature controller. It did come in sherwood green though, with a kickass counter top!
I have an old Radio from the 50s - big wooden piece of furniture with a turntable and everything. The plug on that thing is absolutely terrifying, super flimsy and so small you have to almost touch the prongs to plug it in.
A plug is probably the easiest thing to replace on an appliance.
True, but that may be indicative of other safety issues that are not as obvious.
I mean that you should probably at least deal with the plug, if you ever use that thing.
The plug on that thing is absolutely terrifying, super flimsy and so small you have to almost touch the prongs to plug it in.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the secret of building appliances that outlast their owners.
Porteus mills made such a good product they went out of business.
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?
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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.
Mostly survivorship bias
Me when I have no idea how capitalism works lmao
Y’all are going to hate this, but IMO a more viable solution is a subscription model. The more reliable an appliance is, the less you spend on it in the long run, so less profit for the manufacturer. With a subscription, the more reliable they make it, the more profit they get. Then you just need sufficient competition to keep the subscription prices low.
Then you’d run into the same problem you have with insurance where they refuse to fix/replace your appliance because of “misuse” or something like that.
The problem here is the for-profit model that drives mass (over-)production and planned obsolescence.
We can do away with this if a company embraces a completely different model. Instead of doing the usual thing, go 100% on-demand with pre-orders, and only build what people want to buy. Then, keep moving horizontally into other product lines, following the demand and manufacturing need. Once pre-orders hit a given theshold, manufacturing starts for a given product. This eliminates all kinds of overhead and allows the company to survive by investing in multiple revenue streams. As a bonus: it’s a lot less wasteful since you never make more units than you can sell.
Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer. They’re a really bad tax, and people dislike them for good reason. I want to buy a thing from a company, and that’s all; it’s not my responsibility to keep them afloat after that transaction.
Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer.
Think of your monthly spending as a probability distribution. They provide value by reducing variance of that distribution at the cost of increasing the mean.
Consider at a more concrete example. You’re provided with two options:
- You get $100 a month guaranteed
- Flip a coin each month. On head, you get $200. On tail, you get nothing.
The expected value for both are the same, but option #1 is predictable. It’s the better option of the two unless you’re in a situation where getting $0 is effectively equivalent to getting $100. You would need to increase the amount you get in option #2 to make it worthwhile. Similarly, you can decrease the amount you get in option #1 and still have it be the better option.
By default, life is like option #2. The value proposition of insurance and the like is to give you option #1 with an amount lower than the expected value of #2, and in exchange, they get the difference as profit.
