Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.

This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.

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cortesoft 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As easy as it is to blame customers, I don’t think it is irrational to just buy the cheapest. So many times the more expensive one isn’t any better and you are paying for branding and marketing, and just wasting your money.

At least if you buy the cheapest one you know you are at least saving money up front.

	▲	jerlam 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It also doesn't help that for school backpacks, the buyer and the user are different people. There is less incentive to take care of stuff, and when it breaks, parents are more likely to blame a bad backpack than to blame their children.

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iterateoften 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The high cost of labor has nothing to do with reusable parts of the washing machine. If it was all standardized, you could do a lot of repairs yourself.

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infecto 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It actually plays a pretty large role in the problem. This is like when people complain about not having enough small cars in America, they simply don’t sell well. Similarly, the average consumer does not want to be doing their own repairs. A lot of appliance repairs are already pretty darn easy.

When the base labor charge is already 10% or more of the total replacement cost it becomes hard to justify the repair.

	▲	infecto 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Was revisiting the thought and it’s like the Framework laptop. There is absolutely a market for it but it’s far from the dominant market. Consumers on average simply don’t care.