I had a not-so-drastic experience with a high-end samsung fridge: A design flaw where the recirculation fan would accrue ice, and symptoms were that it sounded like a chainsaw every time it turned on, and eventually the fan would freeze over. The only way to "fix" it was to thaw it out every few weeks, and any attempt to replace parts was futile since it was a design flaw, not a mechanical failure.
If the shelf is glass, and the glass is not resistant against wide temperature variations, the glass weakens and eventually will shatter.
My shelves are generally packed with large jugs. For example, on a main shelf I might have 4 gallons of milk and a half dozen half-gallon containers of juice and then more stuff to fill out the remaining space. Door shelves are similarly packed, with the ones in the Samsung being about 12x8 inches and thus big enough for gallons of milk.
The fridge is constantly used by kids. It needs to be mostly restocked every other day.
Glass shattered in one of the $400 fridges. The other $400 fridge is wire. Glass shelves in the Samsung would break around the edge, leaving me with an intact sheet of glass and some broken plastic. Door shelves are always plastic. Samsung snapped white and clear plastic together to make the shelves, with a fragile zig-zag at the joint. I got to wrapping the shelves with string-embedded packing tape before installing them, which increased the typical life from weeks to months.
Give me forged metal grates please, or at least something like rustproof storm drain covers.
Price does communicate some usable information. The problem is that most people naively assume that the more expensive item must be better, while the good items are actually fighting for an informed customer looking for a good cost/benefit. That means that most of the very low price stuff is crap, but also that if the value you can take from an item has a ceiling (limited comfort options, limited maintenance savings, limited "extra durability"), most of the very high price items are also crap.
So, Mr Customer, how do you really feel about our product?
Yeah, definitely satisfying. Well played.
I don't agree. I think you can still buy quality things. The problem is that the market pushed the prices so low for "good enough" products, that it's difficult to justify paying much more. In the case of refrigerators, you'd have to pay at least three times more for a Sub-Zero fridge, for example.
I went looking at high-end oven/range things one day, after having had the Samsung fridge experience. I noticed that underneath the fancy knobs they had the same crappy quarter-inch shafts as the low-end models. Some of the knobs looked like seriously impressive chunks of steel or brass... but that only put more weight and leverage on the standard-sized shafts.
I saw somebody take apart an older iPhone, maybe the 4. The phone had some really nice looking buttons on the side, machined out of stainless steel. Inside the phone it was a very different story: really flimsy crap.
Samsung made the largest fridge available. I got the $2500 model: stainless steel, no IoT but digital, double doors over drawer freezer. It looked really solid and durable. It failed in so many distinct and interesting ways!
The door shelves constantly shattered, at $50 each. The structure had been compromised by artistic design, with two kinds of plastic joined together. The ice maker died. The main shelves broke a couple times. The temperature display (blue 7-segment numbers) became nonsense. The drawer handle had a hinge made from plastic which broke and non-stainless steel which rusted out. The compressor went out, as we determined by diagnostic codes. The tech sent to fix that ignored us, never checked diagnostic codes, didn't look at the compressor, insisted that our problem was the ice maker (which was indeed broken but not our complaint), charged us $75 for nothing, and fought us when we did a credit card charge-back.
I cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying.
The replacement is a pair of smaller fridges that were about $400 each. One of them even has old-style wire shelves that seem unlikely to shatter. We've only had two broken shelves so far, in the other one.
Famously, there was a "lemons and cherries" paper on the economics of used cars. I think it also somewhat applies to new goods. There is information asymmetry here. I can't know that the hinges are fragile plastic and non-stainless steel. The fridge looks nice, and it says "stainless steel". I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.