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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

This is beginning in the wrong end IMHO. One of the big problems today is that products are:

1) Not made to be repaired. 2) Not made to last 3) Repair manuals are not easily and widely available 4) Manufacturer have monopoly on replacement parts making them extremely expensive.

I would instead create tax incentives which encourage manufacturers to make repairable and durable items, and pass laws which makes it easier for the competition to make compatible replacement parts so they are cheaper.

How many products don't we have where one stupid little plastic thing breaks and it becomes useless. Getting the part is difficult, expensive or hard to install.

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I think you're right about this, but I wonder how feasible this is in a country like Sweden where most of the complicated manufactured goods that break easily are probably produced elsewhere and the population is not big enough for foreign manufacturers to be bothered investing the requisite capital to redesign their products. It might be effective to do this kind of a thing at a European level, where the size of the market is big enough that producers will consider it worthwhile to substantially change production practices.

Sony still have offices there after the merger of their and Ericsson's mobile handset divisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mobile

Incentivize the consumer and you incentivize the producer. The idea is that this will create a market need for easily repairable products.

Or just subsidizing an increase in cost of repair parts

There's another angle too. For a long time the only tailor in town was basically a bridal tailor. They charged steep prices for simple work on everyday clothing, and wait times were long.

Fast forward to today. I had ripped holes in a few pairs of pants, and was wondering if it made sense to have them repaired- I was pretty sure I was going to be charged as much as the pants were worth for a fairly simple repair. Luckily there's a new shop in town, run by a group of older ladies who seem to have grown up tailoring, that charges sane prices.

Anyway, the point is repairing can be uneconomical simply because of lack of availability of repair resources.

As an example on the other side, Autozone has enabled countless mechanics with their tool library programs and other basic shadetree services like easy oil recycling.

(P.S. Maybe I should learn to sew & get an inexpensive sewing machine, but that isn't the point)

Repair services in any western country will be hideously expensive because it can't be automated and has to be paid western wages, while the products themselves are made in an automated fashion with third world wages.

For this repair stuff to work, we have to make it easier to do so that people can do it themselves.

It does depend on the product.

I have a KitchenAid blender and a KitchenAid stand mixer that I've had to repair. In both cases, the part was purchased for under $10 online and repair only took a few minutes. The alternative was buying a new $300 or $100+ product.

Sure, I did the repair myself, but a local KitchenAid service center (yes, they exist!) would probably have done the job even faster.

It boils down to cost/benefit. Would I have done the same thing with a $30 mixer? Not worth it; simpler to buy a replacement, but in this case, the products are built to last (both broken parts were "sacrificial" and designed to fail before something more expensive failed).

Sacrificial parts are great design IMO, specifically when they protect a much more expensive part. However, it does bother me that the parts are often very custom and only available from the manufacturer.

I enjoy listening to a conversation where some blowhard talks about was was obviously a shear pin breaking in some mechanical peice of equipment and then replaces it with a grade 8 bolt.

Well there is the desire for the consumer to keep an item they know works (ie, a good-fitting pair of jeans or shoes).

I think the incentives here will simply make that edge-case more viable.

In order to make a sea-change, Sweden and other countries will have to go to war against mass-market manufacturers.

For a lot of things and a lot of small repairs/modifications (even just cleaning in some cases), all that's needed to is to use standard screws that aren't super soft. They were invented to allow reservible fastening of things, and they're great, if you're not making them suck on purpose. Unless you're making it even easier than screws, make the screws rock solid and straight forward.

It's a little chicken and egg, the bridal shop was able to command high prices because they were the only game in town and served a luxury segment of the market. As a result less people want to repair clothes. But if there was high demand, there would be a competitive market of general purpose tailor, and repairing clothes would be cheaper & more attractive.

The one factor you're missing in the equation is that those products, made in automated fashion with third-world wages, have to be shipped across an ocean, and then shipped to distributors, and then sold in retailers that pay western wages, and which are owned by corporations that demand western profits. The retail mark-up of almost any item is enormous, probably at least half to 2/3 the cost.

When you repair something, you avoid all that retail mark-up. However any parts you buy will also have a big markup usually, plus shipping costs.

Nudie Jeans company in Sweden offer free repairs on their jeans. So that's another way to go. (I'm not affiliated with them)

https://www.nudiejeans.com/page/this-is-nudie-jeans

Nudie Jeans? Is that a subsidiary of The Emperor's New Clothes Company?

They also send you free repair kits too, which I'm about to use on my pair of them.

Two ideas since I hate things that breaks for no good reason:

I bought a "used" (actually just preowned, not used) but real sewing machine for about $50 last year .

Even simpler I also figured out that especially for jeans fabric glue is amazingly simple to get right (IMO, YMMW) and if I apply it before damage is done nobody even notices, just make sure you use another washed out fabric, apply fabric glue evenly and apply it to the inside of the knees etc.

Edit: removed unnecessary details

>one stupid little plastic thing

I got into 3D printing recently and it's wonderful in this respect. I've made replacement parts for several different things.

3D modeling isn't as daunting as I expected either, at least in Fusion 360.

Isn't this better? Manufacturers can make rational decisions on tax breaks vs additional costs. Here, they have to compete with a "easily repairable!" label from a competing product. That's hard to price.

If that was an advantage when selling, they would already have done it.

The tax break for consumers makes it more advantageous.

If the cost of repair goes down via tax incentive, then the lifetime cost of a repairable product becomes marginally less expensive. That creates a new advantage for selling repairable products.

A student and an economics professor are walking across the quad.

"Look, a $20 bill!", says the student. "Someone must have dropped it."

"Nonsense!", replies the economics professor. "If there were a $20 on the ground, someone would have picked it up!"

>> Getting the part is difficult, expensive or hard to install.

I'm running into this with some of my drones now.

The 3DR Iris Plus was released in 2014 and they've already ceased supporting it, less than two years after releasing it. This means no more OEM parts available and whatever is out there right now, is out there. I have found only one distributor who carries parts for this model - so I'm left with either being super careful and not crashing again (unlikely) or selling it to someone who doesn't know they can't get parts for it anymore.

I'm probably going to sell it. It was shocking to know they just dropped hardware support for this model after only two years of supporting it.

Yeah I think the key to this repair economy is cheap and easy to use 3D printers. They will allow us to make so many needed parts on demand as needed. Alternatively if 3D printing stores were more easily available and the 3D models for all sorts of plastic parts was easily available you could go to a 3D store and have the part printed.

In short I think we need to think a bit more about how to organize things than exclusively thinking about taxes.

Wouldn't manufacturers start using more patented, unique parts or DRM or some other solution in order to force continued planned obsolescence?

If only companies open sourced the 3D designs/models for products & parts they no longer care about - why not? Perhaps Sweden could incentivise exactly this outcome?

Why tax incentives? We have too many of those already.

I'd hope that if that government had to spend less dealing with discarded products (aka trash/recycling) as a result of manufacturer actions/practices, they'd pass those savings on.

Why do you think that the government should pay for the externalities of discarded products? Shouldn't that be on the original manufacturer?

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