Suppose light bulbs cost twice as much but lasted much longer, you would not need to buy them nearly so frequently. Therefore, consumers would spend less money on lightbulbs in a lifetime and the manufacturers would make less money.

Things are often designed to break and force the consumer to purchase new stock. It's known as planned obsolescence.

The only reason to build things to last would be if you cared more about workmanship and pride than economics. While this might be true for individuals, it is almost never true for shareholders and therefore incredibly rare as a company outlook.

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Planned obsolescence keeps you coming back.

As someone who lives three blocks from a Harbor Freight I can tell you that you can sell people literal landfill and they will buy it if it's half the price of the competitor.

I have a subwoofer by Polk that is a perfect example of garbage. It’s designed with a standby mode and will turn on when the amplifier senses a signal. Well this thing is actually on all the time drawing electricity through 2 crappy capacitors with low tolerances. Over a span of time these capacitors heat too much and eventually fail, leaving the owner to junk the whole thing and start anew.

This thing was designed this way on purpose. If you go online you will see some of the owners who know better will replace these capacitors for less than 5 dollars to bring them back to life.

This is what happens with a lot of devices. They plan them to fail just like this. It’s a racket.

Money are debt ... that means everything have to "grow" all the time, in order to pay the interests ... forever ... FOREVER!

The system's self destruction is literally built in to its foundation.

One is made in China. The other is made pretty much anywhere else.

Simple. It is said that in China, they even sell fake rat poison. Why? If you can grab a handful of skittles, dye them in blue dye and sell them for 5x the cost of a bag of skittles. Multiply that by the number of households and businesses in China with rate problems = overnight millionaire.

As everyone has already stated crony capitalism. All of the major manufacturers have conspired together to make low quality stuff.

A company made a 100 year light bulb. That company went out of business. How many can you sell before no one needs to buy any more?

My fav example is with vacuum cleaners. At first, when everyone just beat the dirt out of their rugs, vacuum companies had to convince people to buy it. They had to be easy, effective, and worth having. Once vacuums became the standard, companies didnt need to worry about quality, they needed to worry about a steady flow of customers. Someone who buys 1 vacuum that lasts 50 years isn't going to be as much profit as someone who has to buy a vacuum that craps out every 3 years.

A company that tries to hit all market demographics. High end quality for those that need or desire the best. And those that just want the brand.

There are probably still companies out there that manufacture theee best. Can’t afford it or work hard enough for it? It ain’t for you.

I used to work for a company that made consumer products. At the beginning of the product cycle, the marketing people would tell us they needed, say, a $4.99 item, a $7.99 item, 2 $14.99 items and a big $49.99 item. That comes from the retailers. From there, everything is developed to meet that price point and the required margins for us and the retailer. I’ve literally sat in meetings where they cut out the one thing that made the product special just to save a nickel on the ex-factory cost. Then they wonder why it didn’t sell.

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Problem in a capitalist society is incentive : most companies are just willing to sell more. We could for example have a renting system for most appliances : oven, fridge... The incentive will then be to have durable things and quality, so the customer keeps paying and the maker doesn't have any repair to do.

Also, right to repair should be mandatory with a steady supply for replacement pieces. Standardisation for phone batteries, chargers, should also be a thing. Open source OS for end-of-life products.

A lot of people are just throwing around planned obsolescence and the intent to make you replace things every x years or so. But I think those are just happy side effects of other contributing factors that are at play...

So no company has ever started out saying, let's make a product that is just good enough to last until our next one comes out. They start out trying to make the best, the best thing they can possibly make to break into the market. For example let's say a company want to make a toaster. They have to compete with other already existing toaster companies so they have to build a better more robust toaster that maybe even costs a little more than the competition, but they can get away with it because they can market it as a well built premium toaster. So years go on and their toaster is selling pretty well and sales start out pacing production because they are slicing market share from the competition toaster as they eventually break and customers switch brands to one that is more durable. So the company has to figure out a way to make more and more toasters, in the same amount of time, you can speed up the assembly lines, but that might affect quality as workers have to work faster and might make more mistakes. You could make a second assembly line, but that is very expensive because you have to effectively double your factory footprint. Either option also creates more demand for your upstream suppliers. If you require more parts from them, they also have to make the same decision you just made, work faster or expand. Even if you dictate that whatever they do they have to maintain the same level of quality of parts the supply, they may increase piece prices on you. So ultimately, the decision comes down to, decrease quality, or increase price. You can increase price in some situations, and maintain the quality, but at some point the market can only bear price increases to a certain point and it will collapse. Usually the safer and chewper option is to take the quality hit and pay to repair or replace the units that make it out defective.

Now, at some point the company will reach an equilibrium where demand and production levels out. This is where the problems with capitalism start making their way in. If the company is publicly traded or has investors that want infinite money, they aren't going to be content just existing I'm this steady state where they just churn out toasters and make a small but reliable stream of money. They see a flat line of profit as losing. So in come people looking to either chop heads on the assembly line, or cut costs of raw materials. Both reduce quality in various ways and over enough iterations this is how products decline in quality over years. I think planned obsolescence comes into play here, but I think most of the time that is just a side effect of iterations of cost reduction over many years. I think it very rarely comes up in meetings or is actively done in product designing.

You can absolutely quality stuff. It just costs a lot more and you have to know whatvto look for.

Most manufacturers know that people want the most features for the lowest cost, which is the opposite for durability. But there are still plenty that do the opposite.

What are you looking for?

Oh this is where I can shine. Design/manufacturing engineer.

So the three variables are materials, processes, and tolerances (design and employee skill are the 4th and 5th but we’ll leave that alone).

Cheap stuff have cheap materials and generous critical tolerances. They also skip some processes that contribute to quality (aka-reliability, but that’s a slippery topic).

Hard work...and property.

It’s not as simple as that. You’re having some shitty manufacturing across the world it’s hard to say hey let me pay more for higher quality… they’re gonna say sure absolutely and make the same thing, or maybe not. They do it because there is a market for the cheapest product regardless of quality, so why bother if their target customer doesn’t care.

Harbor freight tools vs one of the professional brands.

I still buy harbor freight for tools I’ll barely use… like the giant socket to change my lower fuel filter… I only use it once a year, I’d rather spend 4.00 than 40.00

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The price differences are not as small as you think. And there are bigger product cycle economies in play than just manufacturing cost. Then most people would in many cases go for whatever is cheaper. The price one can very clearly see - how the product is going to hold up in use one can’t.

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I think about this every time I use a spray bottle I bought at Target. They decided to use as small of a screw on connector as possible and as a result, if you hold the bottle by it's fucking handle when it's full, it's likely to disconnect because of the weight of the liquid is too much for the fraction of a turn they decided to make the screw part.

As a grown ass adult, I have used countless spray bottles over my lifetime. Everything from ones specifically bought to numerous products that come in spray bottles. I have never had any one of those other bottles come apart because I picked it up by the handle. I have never spilled an entire bottle of cleaning fluid because the company was so fucking cheap they didn't want to spend the extra few pennies to use an adequate amount of plastic to make a functional product.

I still have this bottle because I hate wasting things and don't want to create additional waste. But every time I use this product and the handle comes off I curse the name of Target and their penny pinching bullshit of making your customers suffer to generate extra profit. Did they really need to squeeze out those pennies? Couldn't they have just passed the cost on to me? Did they not realize how spilling a few dollars worth of cleaning product because of a improperly cheap product pisses people off? Did they not realize I would immediately see the little Target logo on the bottom of the bottle each time it happened and blame them? They spend so much money to advertise and make me associate good things with their brand. Why did they make something so horrible it would fail to do something so basic?

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Often making a quality long lasting product isn’t as simple as spending a few pence more on higher quality parts or materials as most parts in say a drill are made specifically for that tool, not off the shelf.

High quality brands invest millions in teams to design, research and test these items not to mention a long established brand has had time to evolve their product, this is factored into the final cost. A new manufacturer or budget one often won’t have these resources, they know the principles of how a drill works, they have seen other drills but they can’t afford to test it to the same level or spend so much on r&d so they do their best check it works and sell it. Problem is later the failure is usually some small part of the design which unfortunately didn’t get enough development and testing to fix. Could be a power transistor which couldn’t deal with long term use and fails after a year of regular use, could be a button that can’t deal with so many actuations or insufficient cooling when used in certain temperatures or environments. Point is the aspects are tested and sorted by high end brands often costing nothing to manufacturing as it may just be another equally priced component or having a better fan blade design.

Materials are one thing, tolerances and failure probability is the real cost sink. Sure nicer materials cost more money but getting that fit down to a micron of tolerance or getting a failure rate down to six-sigma is an extremely expensive prospect to mass produce.

BIFL is cheaper in the long run, but more costly up front, and we have a failing capitalist system where few people have much money, but also many people want "instant gratification" and are unwilling to do without and save until they can afford BIFL. The toaster in my kitchen is from 1952. It costs the average working person in the "United" States a weeks pay. Our vacuum in from 1970, and costs the average worker a month's pay. Hard to imagine the broke, and yet entitled, and impatient person today buying stuff like that.

Companies figured out long ago that people look at cost #1 and features number #2.

They are in no way rewarded for making something that cost a little more with less features that lasts longer.

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I have had a basic GE fridge for well over a decade. No ice maker, defrost cycle, or water dispenser. It is a 15 cubic food side by side and has wire shelves. I needed to purchase new door gaskets for it. I spent a few under $200 12 years ago on it.

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I have replaced the compressor once and ice maker twice on my modern LG french door fridge that is 7 years old. It cost about 2000. When I get a new one... it;s going to be the same because the family uses the convenience features. the same ones that make it break.

>I guess I wonder. If you go to the trouble of making anything, why not spend just a little more to make it a quality product? Again, I know money. What I mean is, does it really cost that much more to make the product last for a long time? Its like they are running a race and give up at 85% of the way. Just go the rest of the way.

It's a business model. And a strategy.

Bad analogy on my end but think about hamburgers. You can pay very cheap prices for a McDonalds cheeseburger. It's cheap, it's low quality meat but there's a market for it. On the other hand there's a place that uses high quality meat, high quality ingredients and really spends the time to make a burger.

Some companies profit off of high quality. Others churning out low quality to those who don't want to spend much money.

A sleeping bag, a dirt-cheap one, will cost you about $35 on Amazon. A very good one will cost you $600++. The key difference being that the more expensive one is lightweight, can keep you warm in 20 degree F weather and will not break apart.

You see this even with microphones. Chinese companies tend to come up with cheaper components and have very poor quality microphones like the Neewer 800. It's a $20 cheap microphone that's terrible - but it serves a purpose. Then you have on the far end of quality, German microphones, ie Sennheiser, Neumann etc and those are made of high quality materials producing the absolute best in studio sound. But some people don't see the justification in spending $1000 for a Neumann TLM 103 and would rather opt for a $20 Neewer mic. It's different markets catering to different dollars.

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