I've extended the life of several devices by decades through simple repairs. It is no wonder that these same companies that want you buying a new washer/fridge/oven every 4 years are opposing right to repair. They love adding walled gardens to their products. Even our BBQs are getting electronic garbage added that can't be fixed normally...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Personally, I found that if the product is heavy, don't buy it on amazon. Everything is relentlessly based on shipping costs. If you buy wire shelves on amazon, they cost slightly less but the entire unit is far less durable.
Our family motto is "I can make it cheaper than that!" which tells you how often we fall victim to the IKEA effect. Lately I like to budget out my projects so I know if I'm actually saving any money. Especially considering labor. Most of my projects lately are stuff I can't get for hook or crook from anywhere.
You are totally right about heavy stuff on Amazon. To your door freight is SO expensive. The problem is all the stores are setting their prices to Amazon's prices.
It's always the fault of greedy corporatists here on HN -- honestly, that is just lazy thinking. Sure, they want to make money. But also, the average Joe wants stuff cheap. Made in China, lots of plastics replacing metal, lower-density materials, fewer fixable/replaceable parts, limited quality control. You can't really blame companies who build their products like this when it's shown over and over and over that cheap stuff is what sells.
Such as? Every product I've considered buying in the past few years has more price points and options than ever before. Yes many of them are ultra-cheap, but plenty of mid-priced options as well. For example a new top of the line GoPro Hero11 is $550. However you can easily find other action cams anywhere from under $99 to $450, some of which are other GoPro products.
It’s a vicious cycle
Let's say you have a sturdy product with a 1% defect and replacement rate. You make 1000 of them. You have to replace 10 of them, so you've manufactured 1,010 of them in total. Let's say they each use 100 grams of material. You've used 101,000g of material.
Now you redesign it to save 1 gram of weight, but it doubles the defect rate. Again, you make 1000 of them. You have to replace 20 of them, so you manufacture 1,020 of them. But because of the 1g material reduction per unit, you've used less material overall – 100,980g.
These are just easy numbers to work with, but it's not hard to imagine many products might work like this. And the same calculation can be done for either energy or materials.
Requiring data to prove that concepts are a thing is disingenuous -- what products? what timeframe? what metrics? what profit margins vs. outcomes?
I don't need a 2 million strong Postgres DB to tell me that Ikea furniture is more prone to breaking than the heavy Amish furniture they sell a county over.
Nah. Privately held means that they don't need to pander for next quarter's numbers. Publicly traded is always a race to the bottom.