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Re:Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous by brightball on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @09:33AM (#17757700)
They really just have an incentive to make sure that on average you pay more than enough to make them a profit over the expected lifetime of your fridge. They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors.

You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience. The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down.

Re:Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous by thaumasiotes on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @09:41AM (#17757768)
> They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors.

Sure, as long as you assume higher power consumption doesn't increase the cost of operating the fridge.

If you're not willing to assume that, then "regardless of power consumption" doesn't make a lot of sense.

Re:Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous by throwaway8689 on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @12:26PM (#17759321)
If the buyer/owner of the of the fridge is the landlord but the user and power bill payer is the renter then the landlord has little incentive to care about power consumption.
Re:Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous by Gustomaximus on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @09:50AM (#17757852)
> The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down

While this mentality definitely exists, this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation. Hence why personally I tend to stick with established companies for things like trades as in the absence of a personal relationship, knowing someone has a brand to protect (and history against it) improves my chance of receiving a quality good/service

Re:Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous by smallnamespace on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @12:06PM (#17759158)
> this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation

While the preservation of a brand might be rational for a corporation as a whole, it might be somewhat easy for executives that are paid quarterly and annual bonuses to temporarily goose profits by sacrificing long term reliability and brand (which only shows up with a long lag time, years down the road), then take their bonuses from investors before going somewhere else.

This theory of 'looting' by executives might leave both customers and long-term investors worse off, but is caused by the inability of customers and investors to perfectly incentivize (or monitor) long-term decisionmaking.