O Holy Crap
thefp.com
thefp.com
That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby.
I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
My biggest bugaboo in this area is with clothes. At some point I started being more careful, but found the published specs won't help because they don't actually tell you everything you need to know, or the company selling them is being defrauded themselves by manufacturers making things out of spec. In many cases too I'm convinced people have lost communal knowledge of what good items look like because theyve never seen them. So, say, they're happy with a sweater that is made out of very poor yarn that obviously won't last because it's warm and has a good zipper. We're at 2/3 now I guess.
However, even places like Consumer Reports will say they don't recommend an entire class of appliance, but then proceed to provide ratings, that are ostensibly good. How are those supposed to be interpreted? "None of these are worth buying but they are 95/100 in quality if you take that into account"? No wonder people are confused.
I've bought clothes from reputable vendors, with fabric from named mills to specs that should be quality, and found instead the cut was off spec and wouldn't fit. Or something about the fabric just didn't last anyway. It seems like it's always something, like I'm constantly being tricked in some new way once I figure out some other problem. It's such an enormous waste of money, time, and resources.
A decade ago I'd buy jeans and they'd last years. Unfortunately my waist line has since increased and none of those survivors now fit me.
I started with Levi 511s and -- when they started failing -- moved to Nudie Jeans (2x price) as they offer free repairs. When I tried to get them repaired though I was told there was a six week waiting time which seemed excessive.
Next I went with a local atelier (3x price) figuring if I spent more that would solve the problem but it happened again.
Alternately, the moment you buy new pants, add some iron-on patch reinforcement across the area. A two-dollar giant patch can spread the force out quite a bit and probably double the lifetime of the unreinforced fabric.
But really, a tailor should be able to tell you what's wrong with the fit and how to fix it.
It's a combination of stretching and friction. Jeans have it especially bad because they have prominent seams right where the thighs touch, causing an extra large amount of friction. A gusseted crotch (which I believe the Ballroom jeans have) both helps with the stretching and moves the seams around.
I got these from uniqlo and like them quite a bit but, beware, they're unwashed and will shrink some when first washed so keep that in mind when buying.
I too notice the decline in jeans quality. The cheap jeans I had as a kid in the 90’s were nearly indestructible. Sometimes I’d skin my knee but my jeans wouldn’t get a hole…
Our 5000 euro door, made by local craftsmen with high quality materials, had an installation mistake that ruins ergonomics and compromises the airtightness. I even went for a non-sliding door in the expectation that it would be more reliable. Maybe the sliding door would have been entirely non-functional by now.
My ~400 euro yamaha reface mini-synth has internal speakers that buzz. It's a known problem affecting every one ever made AFAIK.
I'd guess only maybe 1/3 of the top dollar expensive stuff I have bought has been free of glaring defects, despite researching before buying.
My biggest recommendation is buy 100% cotton and avoid synthetic blends at all costs. Some of that crap looks old after a single wash.
That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes.
Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDTV almost 20 years ago that's still running fine.
For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't care, main use would be for Nintendo.
Parents decided to splurge instead and spent almost $400 on a Toshiba unit with a digital channel display and a remote(!). It also understood cable. I could watch Nick at Nite on it when I went to sleep.
$400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV.
EDIT: For a nostalgia hit, I went searching for it. This is the model they got me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE
Those 1980's tvs could display Knight Rider, Miami Vice, The A-Team and Moonlighting natively, without the need for any kind of streaming service.
Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big.
The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode.
The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts.
Nylon gears in contact with ozone, and switches and connectors of all kinds seem to be the problem on everything I've seen. Which is why I always say I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch.
This creates a whole new reliability problem. Software reliability is notorious for its interface failures and there can be many more of those modes (where hardware typically has a few wear-out style failures). I think about my relatively high-end TV that seems to always struggle with software updates without any glitches. It seems like we've just been lulled into accepting software glitches as the price of having software control everything. Luckily, most of the software is not safety critical.
I think this is one of the dangers of relying on software to close reliability gaps. Yes, you can change it quickly and cheaply and it's versatile, but it's often very hard to identify all the failure modes.
And the thing is, somehow every vendor seems to skip out on ensuring a working out-of-band upgrade process - despite U-Boot bringing everything you need with it to provide recovery via whatever means you want. Ethernet, USB, a serial debug port... hell, I did A/B partition support and bootloader checks with a watchdog years ago, hacked together in an afternoon but able to first attempt booting from the fresh firmware, if that failed three times it would attempt the B partition containing the old image, and if that failed it would attempt booting from a recovery partition that was intelligent enough to bring up the base board with enough networking to be able to bring up a web server and accept a signed firmware image.
Or, if that's too complex, a fucking button that the user has to hold and it will boot into the recovery image directly.
It's not rocket science, it's not even much effort, all you need is a fucking week at least and a couple of cents for a switch. Pure penny pinching, and I hate companies that produce hardware that can turn to e-waste because of it.
One can still hope.
They sent me a replacement that works great and is entirely ignorant of the outside world (and will stay that way.)
Or if there's an activation step they never planned to need recovery from failure of?
For non safety critical stuff it's much better to crash every week than to wear out in 5 years.
Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics.
It's the bane of my existence that I have to continuously power cycle a device to do something seemingly simply like change a tv streaming service or scan a document. Interface failures are rampant.
Oh yeah. Like Surefeed smart cat feeders. They don't use end reed or contact switches to control the lid motor - they use current sensing on the motor and stop it when the current surges due to reaching the end position. The problem is, they also use cheap-ass plastic gears on an apparently pretty strong motor... my old Surefeed from five years ago is still going strong, but the newer revision (which is, admittedly, easier to clean) failed after not even a year because the motor had shred the gears and could no longer detect if the lid was fully closed or opened, making noise for so long that the cat refused to use it.
Fucking hell, these things cost 150€+ apiece. Two contact switches and wiring would have cost them less than ten cents. Now they have to pay for the cost of handling the warranty claim... but I'd rather like to have a well-designed product in the first place.
(Oh, and it doesn't like rechargeable C cell batteries either, because they apparently saved the dollar that would have given them a boost voltage regulator, so you're stuck buying disposable alkaline batteries)
They probably wouldn't even need a reed switch, just a wad of foam for some buffering plus a more sensitive stop algorithm. Or better yet, don't give the motor enough current to shred gears even at full stall.
I've got two sure microchip cat doors. They've been reliable. Same problem, hard to clean. When one of our cats figured out how to break through the door sure sent me a 3d printed plastic part that clipped on over the latch. I think their customer care is pretty good.
The new one isn't much better tbh...
> When one of our cats figured out how to break through the door sure sent me a 3d printed plastic part that clipped on over the latch.
I mean, my cats are smart enough to open doors, cupboards and drawers, but how on earth can a cat break through a cat flap?! Brute strength?
- Mechanical: "Here's the physical specs, no need to account for A, B, or C, as it's been handled in software"
- Electrical: "Here are the physical constraints and electrical spec. No need to account for X, Y, or Z, as it's being handled in software."
- Firmware: "You need to handle A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, but if you run out of time or don't have the budget to make up a test rig for validating all those cases are handled correctly, no worries we'll just ship it anyway."
You'll see stuff like a lack of battery level monitoring, or relays without current sensing.
I'm not sure why we don't do things the other way, have firmware people present at every step. Some things can't be fixed later.
If mechanical puts a weak link gear designed to fail before the motor, firmware might not have enough margin to not wear it out with auto-stop.
Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.
After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle.
So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed though to have to order a replacement gear from some obscure place in Florida for like $75 or whatever.
I bought an official replacement from KitchenAid for $12 including shipping.
This is a good call out of potential other reasons an engineer team might make something cheaper & easier to break. It would be awesome to read a summary of the trade-offs the teams discuss in their process.
($YOU may be. I'm not.)
Except that nowadays I tend to just guess the latter and I'm statistically correct anyhow.
Superman has a quote about living in a world of cardboard, where he must control his every move lest he rip through everything. I'm beginning to feel that way myself with these consumer products. If you take them even 5% out of spec expect them to catastrophically fail. They'll catastrophically fail even if you use them entirely within spec. I'd happily pay a bit extra for something that wouldn't but there's no way for the manufacturer to successfully convey to me that this is such a thing even if they wanted to. The metaphorical water is so metaphorically muddied that it's just dry dust now anyhow, with fake 5 star reviews and decades of refinement on marketing messages about how this vegetable peeler peels vegetables so well that it will even enhance your marriage prospects.
Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.
when your $400 TV breaks in 2022, you buy a new one because its relatively inexpensive and you can get a larger one for the same price.
I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price.
People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectations that makes $25 denim the norm.
Do they? There have been times I'm willing to pay whatever needs to be paid for quality items, and I just don't know where to find it. You can find the brands that used to make quality items, selling for the same premium prices, but often they're just selling the same unreliable stuff in slightly spiffier dress.
AKA: Your dishwasher dies and you send it to the dump. They'll look it over document the failure and back charge the manufacturer for the retail price.
You have given me a new utopian dream. This is a clever solution.
We survive comfortably by sharing practical skills in the household: sewing, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, CAD (for 3D printing replacement parts), painting, etc. Products straight from the factory are often substandard, but a good set of tools, library books and tutorials can close the gap to usability if you have the time.
A great example is Tile, little tracking tags for your keys. I bought one, and in a year the battery died, just in time to get an email from the company offering a 10% discount on a new one.
Indeed. So I skim the article and wind up agreeing with how some things seem to be built to fall apart or under perform (modern HE washers, I'm looking at you). Then I get called to the shop floor to check a machine and the operator, an older gentleman gets to talking with and starts the same conversation! He is in his mid 60's his you'd think he'd go on lamenting the loss of the sturdy goods from his youth but nope! He too said there was plenty of cheap flimsy crap to be had.
Though one thing I will say has changed: the ability to repair stuff. Computers stuffed with proprietary code have taken control of even the simplest appliances (washers, stoves, refrigerators). Things that were made from multiple pieces of stamped or cast metal are now made from a single piece of plastic that is less sturdy which melts or deforms under heat (some eventually become brittle and crumble). I can see how it makes things cheaper and easier to make but they don't sell the plastic bits separately requiring me to toss everything over a single broken piece. And even if something is made of metal, the stamping or casting is so thin that it might as well be made of plastic (e.g. the tin foil harbor freight stock carts.)
But the retailers and consumers are adjusting to this model: goods are so cheap they are disposable. Don't bother returning it, just toss it. This has lead to people buying new items and tossing them right into the trash because amazon will ship another. Or maybe return the broken item in its place. Or you buy a new item to take a part off and toss it because amazon told you to. Consumers get to keep buying cheap crap and companies keep the money rolling in. This low effort thinking is filling landfills with unused or barely used items at an alarming rate which is a great example of unchecked capitalism. Whats worse is I guarantee you most people could live happily without most of the shit they buy.
In conjunction with the decline of repairability in the appliances I think there's a corresponding decline in repair skills among the general population as well.
What I want is someone that I can pay to sew stuff for me and have it not suck.
The problem is that someone who does that is continually having to hunt down new clients since their stuff doesn't fall apart. And they can't charge enough because the crappy stuff is soooo cheap that it sets the floor of the pricing.
If we want artisans to make a comeback, we're going to have to help them somehow.
The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2:
* Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year.
* Devices which are hard to repair.
That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'.
For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months?
So how do we get rid of _that_?
Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.
That's cool. I like high quality clothing too but noticed as I age that it's my body that needs the repairs. It's been a tight-fitting last couple years and my clothes still have so much life left.
The EU will just give fines and nobody will care. Regulation is not the best path here.
That's cool. But, more than likely it'll be your body that will need the repairs.
Nudie jeans by any chance?
This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:
> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.
The play came out in... 1949.
It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin.
For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen.
Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same.
There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.
Though this too can become hard in categories dominated by cartels : warranties for (magnetic) hard drives have been going down (not to mention the recent frauds by Western Digital, how they have fallen, sigh...), or, for (non-related) reasons, boycotting Intel and Ryzen CPUs (or Android an iOS smartphones) doesn't leave you many options, though RISC-V (and "real" Linux) have been making great strides in the recent years.
I have to admit that particular strategy hadn't occurred to me - but it's a good idea. Of course, it has to be an actual part-of-the-standard-deal warranty, not the hard-sell extended warranty that's really just an add-on insurance policy...
(Wondering where I find a box of staples warranted to pierce more than five sheets...)
Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.
I've heard this many times while at auto body shops. It seems that it's not the electronic parts cost that is expensive but you have to dissemble much of the car to replace the parts.
Current cars get more power and fuel efficiency, but its at the cost of complexity like high pressure direct injection, stop/start, variable length intakes, cam phasers, etc.
Its nothing to do with computer control making them brittle, more that there's just so many extra components to fail that just didn't exist on older cars and the techs need training on how they operate and troubleshoot.
The downside is that cars especially have not gotten cheaper. (This is starting to change, sadly by necessity rather than choice, ~ton personal vehicles will soon be the thing of the past even in rich countries.)
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-car-sa...
It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC.
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...
IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natural monopolies, like power/water supplies. Some kinds of markets really are more efficient with fewer participants, and we should find ways to encourage that efficiency without letting the lucky winners indefinitely dictate the terms of the market.
Definitely not even close to 10-15 years I was promised.
And this is why warranties are pointless. How am I supposed to get one of these bulbs from a four-pack replaced by the manufacturer two years after I bought it?
Was having my house painted a few years back, I have a triple set of spots near the very top of the roof (so about 30 feet in the air) - painter helpfully suggests - do you want me to replace those bulbs up there while I have my ladder up there? I agreed.
Big mistake, the bulbs their were still working 17 years after I moved in - now I have to replace them about every 18 months with the cheap crap the government only allows to be sold.
Not sure how replacing bulbs and throwing them in the landfill every 1-2 years is doing anything good for the environment.
It's simple physics :-)
This is anecdotal, but I had a bunch of bulbs of the same brand that started to fail, on the remaining bulbs I drilled a few air vent holes into them as they are used indoors only, and since then haven't had another failure.
I'm suspecting most LED bulbs fail from thermal stress on the driver circuitry.
And by the way, since the topic of "where do I find the good stuff" keeps coming up, why is there no site that is your one-stop recommendation destination for finding quality appliances, tools? We all know we can no longer trust Amazon reviews.
Consumer Reports has been around for ages but I don't feel they've kept in lockstep with the changing times. Maybe the Cool Tools site? But it seems a little too casual and not as rigorous as CR, too eager to direct you to Amazon as well. I don't know really. Just spitballing.
And yeah for products like these you really need to search prosumer forums for the specific area in question, Consumer Reports would be useless.
1. The prosumers can get detached from the needs of ordinary consumers (see: audiophiles)
2. Some products just don't generate enthusiasts. I recently had to buy a washing machine. All the reviews are sponsored and slightly suspicious crap because nobody cares enough to be the Tom Laundry Tips of the world
They're noticeably sharper and truer than the ones you find now, more perfectly symmetrical in profile and grind, probably a half-dozen other subtle differences. When you drill a hole with one of these bits, all of the shavings are uniform and the sides of hole aren't ragged. There's less vibration, less heat, more progress.
When inheriting or estate sales aren't an option I've actually been buying a lot of used stuff off of eBay lately. PC's (the trick is to select "no OS included" to find the business ones IT departments are discarding), a label maker you could use as a bludgeon in a pinch, a vintage flannel that's actually wool.
I've come to really like second hand. Clothes don't shrink when you wash them, boots are already broken in, and things have generally survived past that first failure spike that weeds out the lemons.
Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself.
Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator.
I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder).
Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad.
I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
Every 2-4 years I replace the dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine. The first replacement dishwasher caught on fire; we are on dishwasher #4. The current washing machine has a leak, the water sensor* which somehow functions after being there for over four years (four!) notifies me reliably.
* Samsung has discontinued the water sensor
I know Consumer Reports can’t really account for durability although I think they survey their members to see what’s still working, so it’s better than most places.
My old fridge is running perfectly, and costs me less than $10-$15/month.
A typical modestly price refrigerator these days cost $1000 at home depot (and easily more) - even if I could cut electricity by 50%, saving 7.50 a month in electric, a typical new fridge won't even last long enough to justify the savings..
Are you a fridge salesman or something?
You do understand that many of us would pay more for that fridge and gladly pay way more in electricity to have it perform its job reliably, right?
Sure you have the resources to burn all the electricity you want for convenience, you do you.
1. Newer fridges have much more complicated air flow patterns requiring more fans and elaborate designs (my fridge runs all its fans for 2 seconds to homogenize air every time I close its door, for example).
2. That fan is a standard fan in GE line-up which happens to fit that bill. It's not a fan made extra robust and reliable because it's going to end in a $4000 fridge.
* No need to split & balance the refrigeration between fridge & freezer
* No expectation of a defrost cycle on the freezer
* Generally less stuff: no water or ice dispenser, less lights, less fancy bins & trays & veg drawers etc.
* Chest freezers get opened less, and the top-opening lid lets less cold out when they are opened, and without the defrost cycle the compressor just doesn't have to work as hard.
* Usually greater consumer tolerance for these items being large/heavy machinery so the designers don't even have to worry too hard about keeping things compact.
Refrigerator life should be measured in decades.
Original PYREX was borosilicate glass which is extremely resistant to shattering due to temperature differences and therefore excellent for cooking.
The brand and reputation of quality was established. Time to profit. The brand was sold and gutted.
The material was replaced with cheaper soda lime glass, which if you google “exploding Pyrex” you will discover is dangerously far less resilient to temperature changes.
Presumably out of shame the brand changed to pyrex from PYREX except for lab glass which retains the capital letters.
Generally still is in Europe. For instance this: https://bakerenogkokken.no/borddekking/serveringsskaler/pyre...
Current car is at 202,000km and 11 years and essentially nothing has gone wrong with it except normal wear and tear replacement and it isn't even (in this road salt envioronment) noticeably rusty and it's never even had a spark plug out. Try that even 30 years ago.
On the other hand, motorized kitchen appliances really seem to be designed to be about 0.0001% better than the absolute minimum reliability requirement, lest a few extra pennies of manufacturing cost be wasted. That said, there are still gems. I have reason to hope that the current version of the Braun hand mixer is as good as my 20+ year one. I've had to open that up to resolder a transistor that had shaken loose due to vibration - design error; this heavy component should have been better anchored - but the mechanicals run as if it was new. One the other hand, the design of Braun food processors leaves me with little confidence in their long-term function.
When the delivery guys showed up with the fridge, 17 years ago, they said don't expect much, 10 years maybe. 17 years later the plastic parts on the outside are yellowed and cracked and the door seal is showing its age too, but it still works just fine. And I suspect chest freezers are still as good as they always were i.e. work for many decades (while consuming less power).
I'm not hopeful about the replacements for the washing machine (2000ish) and dishwasher (1987ish) when they wear out.
By now, you'd think we'd have reached a minimum viable quantity of products that have been ubiquitous for so long.
When "Cheap crap" first became common 20 years ago stuff got a bit worse, but it seems to be improving.
As a final thought, I'd say at least in a store, if you have the ability to determine if something is junk by looking and touching it, you can practice that.
> Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)...
I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads:
> looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sharp enough to peel a carrot.
Is this deliberate, or did the author not notice a core problem right there, in their own shopping behavior?
As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...
Especially in the kitchen some good stuff still exists. It's expensive, heavy - and lasts. Unfortunately you won't find those in many of the regular shops. In my city - Nuremberg, Germany - I only see that kind of (expensive) quality in a single specialized store (Kitchen Loesch, https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/). I myself was not aware of the kinds of good appliances that are still made until I went through the lower levels of that store for the first time. I too only knew the stuff most people know, which does not last long, visible at first glance already, with all the cheap plastics it's made of. Much of the better stuff is heavy and mostly made of metal. Even the hand blenders there almost all cost above 100 Euros, far more than I was used to seeing. On the other hand, those devices looked like they would last for a very long time, not like that shitty plastics Philipps model I own. Unfortunately it's not nearly the same to see pictures online, having the actual appliance right in front of you is very different as far as I can tell after that experience of actually seeing them there. The impression of solidity just does not transmit via some online shopping website picture.
Now I'm just looking forward to see how more and more ubiquitous AI deals with real world language.
When I look up "on sale" I get
> 1. offered for purchase.
> 2. NORTH AMERICAN - offered for purchase at a reduced price.
so I guess I associated a US centric idea with the term, since that is what I'm used to.
All the fawning over the Niche Zero grinder does my head it - its using a crappy brushed DC motor and a plastic gearbox more akin to the quality of a $100 sunbeam conical burr grinder I had.
And like my Sunbeam grinder the gearbox will likely start to get very very noisy after 10 years of heavy use, not to mention needing new brushes at some stage which aren't user replaceable.
But hey, one youtube guy said some good things about the Niche so it must be the best!
The good stuff is PYREX.
> What's Undetermined
> Whether Pyrex switched from using borosilicate glass to tempered soda lime glass only after Corning sold the brand to World Kitchen in 1998.
…
> In a January 2011 article on glass bakeware, Consumer Reports stated that they were unable to determine exactly when major U.S. manufacturers (including Pyrex) switched
It's not relevant what the price was: that's a decision for the shop. If they can't sell carrot peelers at a price that makes sense for them, the answer is to not sell carrot peelers, not to sell things that are described as carrot peelers but which cannot peel a carrot.
For example and speaking about grinders, I had a Mahlkönig Vario at first, 370 Euro (https://www.mahlkoenig.com/de/products/vario-home). Mahlkönig is a brand for professional-grade coffee grinders, with some few expensive top-consumer-grade ones in the mix. It's their cheapest coffee grinder.
That particular model wasn't their own, I think they got it from Baratza (https://baratza.com/grinder/vario/), probably to extend their presence in the top-segment of the household market.
Too bad, that model is not a good fit for them at all. Lots of issues. I had mine repaired and it went so badly they sent me a brand new one after I complained with pictures. It's not bad per se or terrible, it just does not quite deliver what one expects from that brand. For example, the seal that prevents the espresso-grade finely ground coffee to get into the machine is just some barely attached rubber ring. Leakage into the machine is an issue. Also, lots of plastic. Very hard to disassemble, soooo many steps and parts, bad for repairs and maintenance.
I wonder, could the opposite reason account for all the companies selling crappy products? Could it be that all the companies that made the really high-quality products that last generations died out because they didn't have a sustainable business model?
It could be that creating a truly high-value product is expensive and selling one that never needs replacement isn't sustainable. Maybe after a while you run out of customers: the ones that are still happily using the product you specialized in making an expensive high-quality version of for life, just don't have a reason to buy another.
Thus perhaps the only companies that survive are the ones who have customers who keep rebuying after their products break.
How can customers help e.g. a refrigerator company survive, if they only buy one from them ever?
Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break.
They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it!
The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it.
The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories.
America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products.
Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
No one? Was it just me then?
I got a wire cutter/stripper recently that gave me that exact feeling: "This isn't a real wire stripper, it's a non-functional replica."
(It's the kind that has a little adjustment screw/slider to set the diameter of the wire you're stripping. Only it's impossible to set the screw correctly because turning it to tighten it forces the slider to shift position. I wrestled with it for an hour and then ordered a different one. The handle plastic is weird too, it feels "icky" somehow. BTW, the new one, which works great, was the same price as the unusable one.)
The unusable one is not worth returning. And what are they going to do with it if I did return it? Throw it away? Sell it to someone else?
> And the world took the loss. A small one, but they add up.
Again, that's exactly how I feel about it. What a waste, to dig up the materials, forge them into this device, send it who knows how far back and forth over the Earth, just so I can throw it back into the Earth because it's not worth fixing it. It's fucking depressing.
I've got more anecdotes: a brand new soldering iron that doesn't solder; an aluminum folding beach chair that broke when unfolded for the first time; an air fryer with a custom grill that rusted in less than a year and can't be replaced; etc...
As far as I can see, you have to go out of your way to find the manufacturers and retailers that care about quality (and repeat business) and patronize them exclusively. Don't give any more money to the folks who are ripping you off. Instead, reward the folks who are doing the right thing. You're going to pay the overhead anyway either by doing your homework or by throwing away time and money and garbage items.
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.
A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
It's just not a "grinder shaped object"
That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022.
It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
I have no evidence to back my statements up, and I'm using extremely vague language, but this is at least my perception of this idea that "they don't make 'em like they used to."
Using other people's money to act like you can afford the things that other people who have much more money than you can actually afford.
The easier and more common this has gotten, the crummier deal everyone ends up getting for their money.
Back when average consumers still had to save money for years before making big-ticket purchases, the shrewdest of manufacturers achieved the greatest success with product lifetimes having quite good multiples of those saving years.
When that became no longer as much of an issue, then never mind.
Expanded credit opened up opportunities for spendthrifts to dominate, who love to consume so much that they replace purchases that are still perfectly good after a few years anyway.
Remember all those 70-year-old juicers where there's far more in the landfills than remaining in the kitchen? Most of those were landfilled while they were still working.
Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention.
Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly.
Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
The new washer / dryer wash more clothes at once using less detergent and far less electricity. They're also quieter. Like, a LOT quieter. And they text us when they finish which I thought was silly at first but in practice it means we get more loads done per day.
It's been 3 years and we've had to use the Lowes warranty once for a leak. Watching the repairman it seemed like a huge hassle to work on these new machines so I don't see these being fun to own once the 5 year maintenance plan expires.
We donated the old washer / dryer to a pet rescue group so hopefully they're still going.
Too bad all of our manufacturing went to China, a culture that has no concept of honesty. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-th... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-...
I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash.
I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh** out of me.
And, from my experience, it's probably the battery that's failing in your cordless vac.
We had a few cordless vacs - each one has died due to the battery. No replacements available :/ Even the very expensive Dyson.
So far, my Dewalt cordless vac (which has a replaceable battery, by design, since it's a Dewalt) works OK. It's a mini shop-vac, but we pull it out for various household uses as needed.
Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that.
Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
I've replaced the belt once. With the amount of hair I pulled out of the beater bar at the same time, I'm not sure the belt was the cause. Works as well as the day we brought it home.
You're going to want to use what you earned, right? So you're gonna maximize profit and shareholder value.
Individually, none of them are particularly egregous. A little less sugar for your dollar, a sticky subscription on your credit card, A Washing machine that doesn't QUITE live as long as it should.
But in aggregate you end up with /gestures broadly at everything.
Those MBA types have been cutting corners on quality for a while...
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...
[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/impeller-replace...
Do you by any chance sell the STL itself for those with access to a printer?
Fancy French-door Refrigerator: still going strong. I tightened the screw on the freezer handle a couple of times.
Cheap fridge in the basement: still going strong, no repairs
Washer and dryer: still going strong, no repairs
Dishwasher: still going strong. I replaced a dish rack when one of the tines broke.
Anecdata, it's fun and useless!
Still, lots of crappy 'appliances' out there. If the labels aren't peeling or fading, then the knobs come off or there's too many parts to keep track of, and one falls behind something and, well, throw it away now.
Our fancy dishwasher had a soap flappy thing in the door. Convenient location! Fill and fold shut and... the manufacturer didn't think beyond that. When in operation it would jam against the wire rack and open about a quarter inch. After each load, a wad of saturated soap paste still inside.
Easy to wonder how such comprehensive failure to deliver (any) value can get all the way to a consumer. Is no one in the product process ever trying these things? Even once?
Well, off to make coffee in a gadget that has too many buttons, generally just flashes lights when I press one instead of actually doing anything, steams milk listlessly if at all, and is very hard to clean.
Marry Christmas!
It does, but it's both slower and less safe than one of these things, if you know how to use it right:
https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-potato-peel...
Personally I'd recommend that style over the "default" peelers that look like this one:
https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-peeler-blac...
The vertical one is much faster.
In my experience the straight style is more ergonomic for carrots and parsnips whereas the Y-peeler works better for potatoes, citrus, and other roughly spheroidal foods.
(I also use my [very sharp] Y-peeler for shaving hard cheeses into flakes so sure, I guess it is a cheese slicer too :) )
I like to cook with my child, they were able to peel carrots at age three using one, albeit with me holding the carrot!
Commercial kitchen equipment is out there and available if you want it, designed to last. It will seriously cost you to get it though.
Why are there no companies claiming robustness / longevity above everything else? Really (my wife might have a say still), I would give a shit about the design and looks of a product if it guaranteed 10/20 years or even lifelong usage, and I would also pay double price at least for true guaranteed and proven quality.
And also why are not more test reviews / magazines focusing more on this aspect? I barely find anything about that. (Yeah, I know one part to this is you will often only find out after 10 years..)
But still, it seems so many peope would be interested in such products, longevity, repairability.. but from multisockets over fridges to cars, every company is just releasing a dozen different products a year (and often you cannot even figure out the difference between SuperDuperRaido1080 vs SuperDuperRadio1085+) that will break soon.
Besides it just making sense would also be very nice and important ecologically.. but where, how? HELP! I have gone on daylong web/magazine researches for all kinds of products, you get lost in advertisements, and usually you are still disappointed by quality 1 month or latest 3 years down the road :(
My dad gave me the advice "buy cheap now and be guaranteed to buy it again at least once if not more, or wait, save up, and buy the more expensive thing only once" as I was becoming an adult. I've tried to follow that but sadly I don't think the advice really holds anymore.
buy cheap, buy twice
Unfortunately, it seems that now it's:
buy expensive, get some shitty cloud enabled feature, still buy twice.
What features keep drawing you back in?
I think the author doesn't understand that there's a tier of disposable goods for just about everything and if you don't shop wisely you'll take some of it home.
Appliances for example: don't buy them from web pages and don't listen to Wirecutter. This is just letting marketers tell you what to buy. Instead go to a showroom that also repairs appliances. They'll know exactly which contemporary brands are crummy because they'll have been fixing them.
Specialty stores will also have the entire price range for the product so you can see what quality costs for that good. Marketers prey on us during times of inflation, making their cheap goods look high end before we adjust to inflated prices. If you've only ever shopped appliances at places like Target, Best Buy, or Home Depot, you may have never seen a high quality appliance in your life. And if a brand you like starts showing up in these stores, run. (Famously, Levi in Walmart.)
There are some product categories for which no strong options exist. For example, contemporary, top-of-the-line Kitchen Aid mixers have intermittently been produced with plastic motor parts. Go look at the reviews for sewing machines.
Klein tools, which have historically been super high quality, made in USA, has started mixing in cheaper made in china products. Chippewa boots (Warren Buffet company) same.
These are examples in a sea of examples. This is a trend.
MBA types move into companies with brand trust and loyalty built slowly for decades, and mortgage it for shot-term profits by slipping in cost cutting measures. It takes consumers a while to catch on, and by then the execs have a nice line item for their resume. Or the holding company behind the changes divests, leaving a hollowed out husk of a brand behind them.
Kitchen appliances are really prone to this because the major processes actually needed in the kitchen - heat, cool, cut, stir - are all variations on a theme, and some of the processes have been usurped by "service" versions where the ingredient is pre-processed, e.g. instead of grinding coffee, buying pre-ground or instant.
Where pre-processing works well, it becomes the norm, and then what follows is that the traditional product gets cost-cut into oblivion, until, decades later, some kind of artisanal movement springs up and there's interest in quality options again. Coffee really did follow this pattern, the original instant coffees set the norm for most of the 20th century, even though everyone can tell that they're nothing like freshly ground coffee.
With the biggest, most-frequently needed stuff - stove, refrigerator, knives, pans - you can find good options in any year, especially if you search for the "do exactly one thing well" options in the category, like chest freezers. Once you get into a more specific category the pressure is off, though, and companies are more likely to sell you a disposable "experience".
Kitchenaid is not a good brand. They haven't made top-of-the-line anything in decades
The store claimed it was 'supposed to work that way'. Lame.
This is true, but there is an area where newer products are not able to live up to older products: repairability. There's far too many products that simple cannot be maintained or repaired - laptop computers from a particularly successful maker of Unix powered machines comes to mind.
Expected one of there parts to fail:
- The motor - The cable - The button - The safety switch that detects the lid
I wonder what happened to the employee who designed this grinder. Maybe they got fired because they should have used cheaper components to generate more profit.
It could also be the effect of attrition. Mechanical engineers nowadays maybe never have the time to become grinding experts before they switch job.
Partly because out lifestyle now is lighter on things, and we need fewer of them. I don't need a juicer because... I don't juice.
Another factor might be that we still have an obsession with "Power". Look at how impact drivers are reviewed, based on how fast they screw some insane fastener most people won't ever need.
If consumers prefer and recommended more powerful stuff rather than stuff that's better at protecting itself, stuff is gonna break.
My vacuum does shut off if you run over the wrong thing. That's not a case of clogging and choking, that's a sensor detecting that I've given it something it's not meant for, protecting itself. I would take that any day over something that would happily self destruct on something, or even chew up whatever it hit.
My Rite in the Rain pen never has issues and very well could last my whole life with no refills. There are bad pens out there, but I have no memory of any time when cheap ballpoints actually worked correctly.
I have not had any experience with a new washer or dryer for very long.
However, new appliances are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. If the scrap is recycled, they may well be just as good as old ones in terms of cost and environmental concerns, even if they break faster.
There are certain categories of things that may be worse overall, but in general, there's close to nothing I'd prefer the old version of.
However, there are probably lots of things where the cheap version now is worse than the old version. But that old version probably cost $40 in today's money and the cheap version cost $20.
A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars.
A broken dryer can burn your house down.
And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down.
It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years.
I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works.
Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+...
I had a VW Cabrio and I noticed that they fine tuned the metallurgy; the stock exhaust system was designed to only last one to two years, the brake rotors were designed to fail after 5 years, suspension components, etc. This is very difficult for a customer to assess the quality of, no one can afford a metallurgical analysis of the steel in their car. Even a Consumer Reports type of ratings company can't do that kind of testing. At best, after 5-10 years, people note a particular car is less reliable and has degraded faster than other similar cars, but by then lots of people own the car.
That said, sometimes there are good reasons to ensure a product will only last a set number of years, for example if you think safety standards will evolve so that old stuff should be phased out after a time. A car from 1977 won't have air bags, a crash cage, roll bars, and maybe only power "assisted" steering and braking. Businesses often replace some things on a specific schedule whether it appears to need it or not, because they are known to fail after a while and the failure mode causes bigger problems. Maybe some products should have a "replace by" date just like food as a safety measure, sprockets on chain saws for example.
Inflation also erodes our perception of the value we should get for a specific price. A $5 manual can opener purchased in 1980 may have lasted 42 years, but if you buy a $5 can opener today it is going to be cheaply made because that $5 opener would actually cost $17.43 today. Some product categories, like large appliances, have obviously degraded in quality though, which suggests silent collusion.
Today there are myriad types of plastics, metal fab processes, treatments, etc. that can be used to build "things". So there are many variables to trade off, and (some) makers will trade off durability and reliability at the drop of a hat for a 0.1% short-term profit advantage. If they even considered those qualities in the initial design.
So her kitchen features appliances plugged into orange extension cords.
I had a German-made burr coffee grinder that died after a few months of use. When I went to repair it I found an approximately 2"x3" circuit board packed with components including relays, optoisolators, chips, and capacitors. I replaced that entire board with a single honking big momentary toggle switch.
Unfortunately, appliance manufacturers haven't quite caught on to the fact that kitchen last rather longer than appliances, and so there are a great many kitchens without a ridiculous number of outlets that are home to appliances with too-short cords plugged into extension cords.
My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on Bluetooth headphones. My coded garage opener takes 3 or 4 attempts each time because I guess the button push don’t register? When I want to watch TV sometimes I need to sit through a system upgrade which means I have to wait to watch. My town voted that cell phone towers are ugly, so there’s basically no cell service anywhere and most calls have between 1 and 5 drops (I live on Long Island, not in rural America). Every year there’s at least $1-3k of maintenance on my 4 year old “luxury” car. My smart lock works well as long as my fingers are perfectly dry and perfectly aligned. I replace my towels once every year or two because they completely fall apart. My “learning thermostat” doesn’t seem to learn anything even though I’ve been setting the temp at the same every night. I replace my jeans at a similar rate to the towels because they get holes in knees and pockets. Holes develop at the same rate in a $25 pair and a $125 pair. Self checkout at every store is a horrendous experience and I’ve never successfully checked out without the support person scanning their badge to fix some absurd error, like the weight of the item placed on the bagging area scale not being the weight the machine expects it to be.
Even if an item is cheaper as a one off purchase, if I have to buy 3-4-5-10 more of the same, am I not paying now for the same higher quality product, but in the meantime the waste I generated is there, pilling up somewhere "else" where it doesn't bother my Western sensibilities.
The research part doesn't work that well either. I spent days researching a variety of products we have around our house and a bunch of different items a few friends asked me about. It's brutal.
Days of reading reviews, days of looking for the faults, days for trying to find the factory that doesn't abuse people or pay them garbage forcing them into slavery. For nothing. Some products work out, some don't, I pay more than the average guy to get maybe an extra year out of the "thing".
I used to have a Logitech MX518 (the original one that came out in 2006 if I remember correctly) and it still works. One of my parents is using it. It handled over 5000 games of Warcraft 3, over 4000 games of CS 1.6, easily 2500-3000 games of Dota and about 16 years in total of browsing websites and general usage. I replaced the skates once and that was about it. The new M590 I bought to keep quiet around the house had a faulty left switch within months... It also cost about half, but that would mean it should work... 8ish years then.
I had an O'Neill backpack bought in the early 2000s and used it for almost 20 years. It's currently being used by a friend who needed a small and simple backpack. I recommended another backpack to a friend, it fell apart in 10 months after costing 100$+. Twice the price of the O'Neill...
I'm tired. I'm tired of having to spend days to figure out if your product will fail within the year. I'm tired of having gone through about 6 milk hand-held frothers until I found a manual one that is a piece of glass and a handle... I had gone through 2 coffee grinders until I found a manual one made out of glass and metal.
Just...
Meanwhile a comparable modern gas furnace lasts at best twenty years.
I long for the time when I can start buying quality goods that last. As it is with small children a lot of stuff has to be disposable because the kids will destroy it. I'm talking couches, kitchen tables, etc. Small children are incredibly destructive!
What's better than selling 10 phones to 10 people? Selling 100 phones to 10 people over 10 years.
Planned obsolescence is a necessary technology to ensure the endless growth of revenue, as required by our economic system.
Don't buy a ultrasonic humidifiers, they actually reduce the air quality considerably [3], you need to get an evaporative humidifier and frankly there aren't that many.
[1] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/news/honeywell-warm-mis...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R911WGTC1OHLL/ref...
[3] https://learn.kaiterra.com/en/air-academy/humidifiers-cause-...
Yet more evidence of the HN community's friendly helpfulness.
Reddit was once a strategy, same with Amazon reviews. Sadly it’s a never ending battle against stooge accounts.
I have a knife. It is a simple piece of metal that peels carrots, apples, and many other things with great reliability. It also performs other functions that a "carrot peeler" could not. It has done so for 20 years and can be expected to remain functional for several more decades.
"Coffee grinder"? how many iterations of the idea of the blender does one kitchen need? (I count a half dozen in my kitchen without trying. 4 more if you add in the lab gear)
You probably have a typical coffee brewer. Those aren’t too picky about their grind, but they take up a lot of space and only do one thing. Most don’t last long.
You could instead get a V60 for about $10 and a nice hand grinder, neither of which take much space. Combine those with an electric tea kettle, and you’ve got nicer coffee in a smaller footprint. The tea kettle still takes up space, but it’s a tea kettle. The grinder is the size of a pepper mill, and the V60 is an indestructible little plastic cone. Tired of cranking the grinder by hand? Hook it up to a drill.
You could use a blender-style grinder with a V60, but you’re going to run into trouble getting it to work right.
Everything is a compromise.
While I'm ranting about kitchenwares, I'm getting tired of saucepans with a life expectancy of less than two years - they're another item I'd expect to last decades. But again the existence of the cheap crap makes it harder to find the better stuff, and certainly hard to have any confidence that what you're looking actually is any better, and not just the same crap with a higher price tag.
I don’t drink coffee but a nicely built hand powered coffee grinder is great at home or even on a camping trip for people who are really into coffee.
But you’re probably right, I bet my $400 Vitamix could grind coffee. Actually, I just googled it, and Vitamix helpfully sells a coffee grinder attachment! Haha, the gadgets never end.
But when today's cars break, there's generally no high school shop class knowledge to fall back on to fix the every-day small things, and anything major requires information, tools, and parts that are beyond most consumers. Remember that the people that work for the car repair places probably didn't have vocational courses in high school, either.
Modern society's items have been value engineered, and it seems like the operating tolerances are narrower as well. Unless there's aggressive maintenance, today's stuff just breaks vs. limping along at some reduced performance level. And some items that previously were built to allow for maintenance are built for wholesale replacement now instead.
It's rare for today's consumers to fix anything, let alone their electronics, but it used to be common for people to try to repair their own TVs by testing and swapping tubes until the 1980s. Of course, before digital TV and cable EVERYONE fiddled with their "sets" to get a good picture. "Snow" and "Rabbit Ears" are not terms associated with TV watching today. I couldn't buy a 40" color TV that spied on my viewing habits in the 90's for the equivalent of today's $299 either.
Shop wisely for your kitchen appliances (mixers, toaster, blenders), high-end cutlery, and tools at thrift shops in neighborhoods transitioning from older demographics. Learn how to sharpen knives and maintain stuff.
Use all your senses: learn what your major appliances and vehicles sound like when they're operating correctly, and listen to them periodically. Extra squeaks or rumbles when the furnace runs? Maybe a new blower motor is in your future. Notice the refrigerator cycling more frequently? You ARE vacuuming the cooling coils periodically, right? Dishwasher door seem easier to operate? Bet one of your balancing springs has failed.
Troubleshooting and maintenance is a life skill.
We were fortunate to be able to buy our first "new" house with new everything 8 years ago. Having all-new stuff was great for a while. The gas water heater lasted 5 years. A nephew plumber replaced it for the cost of the new unit (~1K) vs quoted $5K job by plumbing outfit. Took him 4 hours. The expansion tank started to fail two years later; $69 plus a few minutes of labor. The forced-air ducting between 1st and 2nd floor is undersized, so the single-glower furnace is inadequate to keep the house at a consistent temperature. Finally put in a heat pump this year to partially remedy that situation. Original wall timers for various fans failed about every 2-3 years. Choice is replacing the $20 wall timer with now $25 wall timer, or fixing the original electronics ($1 with a replacement part from Digikey). Original washer, a front loader that came with the new home, failed 1 month (yes, 1 month) out of warranty, with a bad trunion. To fix this required a literal complete tear-down and rebuild with the new tub. GE would do nothing other than send free parts. Our trusted appliance guy said he wouldn't do it, because it took too long (8 hours) and was uneconomic. I did it in about seven, but replaced the washer a few years later, since front loaders just don't get clothes as clean.