> Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.
Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That's the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost.
None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It's an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.
The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking expensive is because they make a lot of money with service. They don't want people fixing their own machines for 20€, they want to have a Miele service person come and swap the part for 250€.
EDIT: And don't tell me that logistics for a heating element are hard. All Miele washers have been using the same heating element for 15 years or so, it's a drop in replacement for the previous version of the part, and it's probably also the single part that breaks most often. That part should be easy to stock and the cost to do so should be trivial.
But heating elements are very simple parts, and I bought it from a reputable local store, so I don't really worry that I'm getting an unsafe part. It's probably going to fail in a few years due to corrosion just like the original part (we have very hard water), and then I'll swap it again.
I am not sure if that is what you mean, but to me it sounds like they might have purposefully put there so that it works like a thermal fuse.
Also, the costs were not so absurdly high 20, 40 or 60 years ago!
Huge profit margin, but you're able to produce much more cheaply than a competitor. Some would say you earned that margin, and in a fair and open market if someone else can also produce them for $10 you'll see prices start falling quickly. If they can't, I don't see how it's a "scam" for you to make money in that scenario.
Again the same strawman. There is nothing "fair and open" in price gauging replacement parts in a market where buyers cannot compare quality, reliability, durability and TCO across products, replacement parts, repair services and guarantees.
How are you not saying that they're making too much money and it's therefore "a clear indication" that it's a scam?
I'd love to be told why I'm wrong rather than just "hurr durr strawman"
Selling replacement parts with an unreasonable markup is a form of bait and switch: the customer buys the product thinking that it will have a given TCO over its lifetime. Only after some time the customer learns that the TCO is much higher when a replacement is needed.
You twisted my words by claiming that making a profit is not a scam.
Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
I have some Miele kit, and I have an insurance policy.
If something breaks, I call the insurance company, get a code. Then I call Miele and book a service appointment using the code. As a result, I have never paid a thing to Miele, not parts, not labour. But I still get official Miele engineer and official Miele parts.
And for some of my older Miele kit (10+ years), they've been out a lot, because the insurance company still deems it more economical to repair than to get Miele to ship me a new one.
If the goal is convenience, then definitely. Home insurance policies are quite a lot more expensive than actual repair costs are likely to be. Which of course is expected, the product being sold is peace of mind and convenience -- both of which people happily pay a premium for.
Hahaha that's a good one... especially as we're talking about Miele here. ;-)
And you're factually wrong anyway.
I didn't say "home insurance", I said "household appliance insurance". Different thing, unless your home insurance happens to cover appliances.
My household appliances insurance is not expensive. It covers 5 appliances, unlimited call-outs, and you don't get screwed at renewal time if you've claimed on the insurance.
As I said, I've had Miele out A LOT over the years and I've never paid them a penny, and trust me on some of my older large appliances they've pretty much replaced 100% of the internal parts.
Either way, the insurance company will turn a profit from premiums. I'm glad this policy has paid off for you, but "reducing costs" is not a good reason to purchase insurance. Insurance reduces risk and makes expenses more predictable.
Put the two together - insurance and appliance servicing company = your described scenario.
e.g. I have a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD drive that has just failed, and lost some of my important data. Its got a 5 year warranty and is only a year old. I doubt I will bother to go through the warranty claims hassle, because the end result is not worth it.
I would have to send it back to Samsung, with my commercially important data on it locked in the chips, and get back another drive which it seems is not particularly trustworthy to rely on again. I've had 2/5 Samsung SSD drives fail and won't be using them for anything important again, I've just ordered a Hynix to replace it.
Another case, I have had a washing machine fail under warranty recently, again about 1 year into a 5 year warranty. It took 7 weeks and many frustrating phone calls before someone came around to actually fix it. Next time I won't bother to get a new washing machine, I will get a second hand one, and when it breaks I will get another second hand one immediately so I don't have the problem of not having a washing machine for sooo long.
My sister in law's oven failed with the self cleaning lock activated. It's an in-wall unit so the repair tech could only think to start cutting apart the wall. Instead, I took a hacksaw blade and painstakingly sawed off the lock. Since I was already committed, we then pulled out the unit and bypassed the failed thermal switch long enough to "unlock" the mechanism. That probably saved at least $1200...
Any insurance is a conflict of interest. The entity responsible for paying out is the same entity responsible for if/how much you get paid out. Any for-profit insurance company is incentivized to pay out as little as possible, if any. Any litigation is likely to cost way more than the payout.
* Except group catastrophic
Ultimately, it's a math problem that must have a positive answer for the insurance company. If 100% of policyholders make claims, you generally pay that profit yourself.
However, in group catastrophic policy, the numbers add up. Substantially <100% of people file claims, so premiums can be set much lower, effectively giving you protection against an unlikely scenario at reasonable cost.
My grandfather was an actuary, and constantly griped that low-deductible policies shouldn't even be called "insurance."
If you want to create something like a national health benefit, do so. But don't confuse people by mislabeling it.
This is not fundamentally different from low-deductible policies. (Which may do more, proportionately to cost, to improve predictability if most variance is the number of frequency of low-cost events)
Not necessarily. Simply holding onto large piles of other people's money can he profitable - eg banks.
What are you on about ?
Let me spell out how my appliances insurance policy works:
1. I call $insurance_company and say "my appliance is broken"
2. $insurance_company says "Ok, here's a code, call Miele, give them the code"
3. Miele sends out engineer with parts who fixes the appliance
4. I sign engineer's job sheet.
5. The end.
- At no point have I given Miele my credit card.
- At no point have I given the Miele engineer my credit card.
- At no point have I received a bill from Miele.
- At no point have I paid Miele in any way shape or form
- $insurance_company has taken care of everything, 100% of everything, every single time.Mine is about 350 a year, but they work out a rate per-appliance and then give a discount on the total, so you can pay more (or less) depending on how many appliances you cover.
> Are you positive this insurance, over the years, is cheaper than what you would have paid Miele directly?
Absolutely.
A Miele call-out will set you back 150 call-out + 100/hour, plus parts on top.
Or (if Miele agree) you can pay a "fixed-price" 300 which covers parts and labour (but again, this is subject to Miele's agreement and that agreement is given on a per call-out evaluation).
And as I said, one of my Miele appliances is 10+ years old, they've been back a good few times replacing increasingly major parts each time, so now the only thing 10+ years old about it is the external casing !
Even if I bought the "official" Miele parts myself, I value my time at greater than zero ! So its still cheaper than me buying the parts and spending a half a day pulling out appliances and fitting parts.
And given the price of new Miele appliances, its not exactly like after 5 years I could afford to replace everything with brand new appliances, since that would cost A LOT more than 350x5.
It sounds like you have a lemon appliance and were fortunate that you had the insurance.
I've had exactly one home appliance failure in the last 10 years - an old fridge that finally died.
The second category would be dishonest agents, which try to avoid payout and have windfall profits and basically skirt the line where lawsuits and reputational damage make that kind of profit impossible. Long term operation as such a business is challenging due to word of mouth, so they must often rebrand or change business names, or just make their products too confusing to understand.
I bought it for 20€ from a reputable local electronics parts dealer. The part I got for 20€ was a high quality 3rd party heating element compatible with Miele washers.
Other manufacturers manage to sell spare parts at more reasonable prices. I just checked a random washing machine from Siemens, and they sell the heating element for 28€. Not quite as affordable as the aftermarket part I got, and they'll probably charge 5-10€ for shipping, but it's a lot more reasonable than the Miele part.
If it was out of the very generous warranty, I expect it would cost loads.
Reminds me of the Planet Money multipart story where they made a tshirt, from scratch. Bought cotton from a farmer, shipped it to a textile industry, contacted a tshirt making company, shipped it to the US.
The bulk of the cost in the end came from transporting the tshirt from the harbor to the store where it was sold.
It's hard to think about physical reality when that's how most of your life is.
The reason that spare parts are so expensive has nothing to do with the cost of logistics or the scale of mass-production. The warehouse can simply order an extra pallet of parts and leave it on a rack as spares. Hell, this is probably what all of these businesses do.
The real reason the pump costs 100 pounds is because the customer has no reasonable alternative, so they will (begrudgingly) accept that before spending 400 pounds on a brand new machine.
If they found out the specific part number of the pump and ordered something compatible from an alternative supplier (I used to go to this effort when younger), it generally ends up costing around 1/5 of the price of an official one.
Note that being unable to profitably replicate the part does not necessarily mean that the part is naturally expensive, or that the OEM already sells it at a reasonable price. The part could just as well be hard to reverse engineer and QA for a third party, or the effort to do that might not be worth it given unknown level of demand, etc. OEM can actually have a natural price advantage over third parties in such complex parts.
If the part is only used say in a single model of dishwasher, there will never be enough demand to justify the creation of an aftermarket one.
Cars as an example, the key here is to allow the market to MAKE replacement parts, and compete to selling them. Stop vendor lock-in
If I want to buy replacement part for my car I often have a selection of 3-5 different vendors making the replacement in addition to the OEM.
You can not tell me that appliances, electronics, etc are that much different from cars that similar solutions can not be found. Especially given that most of these things are just off the shelf parts that the OEM combines into a product anyway
Getting a plastic wheel for my dishwasher's lower roller shelf is $12 from a third-party source (it's $16 from the manufacturer). It's like four grams of plastic. But the rarity of demand just doesn't make it make sense to keep in stock.
(That sort of thing has me halfway convinced to buy a 3D printer. I just don't have anywhere to put it yet.)
Hell even Paper has DRM now, see the Latest Dymo label printers
If the third party parts went through the same certification process, they would be more expensive than genuine parts.
I am not buting this reasoning - the assebly line costs money to run, worker's time and salaries need to be paid, quality control and warranty to be done. A part sold by itself needs none of those things.
While you are taling to me about how difficult logistics of a $200 part justifies a 500% markup, i can buy a $3 led from China with free shipping. This doesnt add up
> A part sold by itself needs none of those things.
A part sold by itself needs so many more things!
Where do you store it? How do you organize it there? How do you keep track of your inventory? How do you re-order new inventory? How much do you re-order? How long do you typically have to store? How do you source substitute suppliers when your original goes out of business? How do you QC stock? Etc. Etc.
All of that for multiples of the part count that goes into a single model, because you sell more than one model.
You can buy a $3 LED from China (see sibling comment for economics on free shipping) because you're buying the current model / whatever version they feel like giving you.
"Part specs may be subject to variation" doesn't work so well with more complex systems.
I am sorry but these questions come across as extremely silly - this is not rocket science, even manufacturers of beer have to figure out these things, if you can't manage a warehouse, you would not be able to be any kind of serious manufacturer in the first place.
Check warehouse rates or spot freight shipping.
That means if a new requirement appears to add something in the warehouse, space needs to be added. In some cases space does not exist around the plant, so you need to get some space in a warehouse somewhere else, most probably managed by a third party with higher costs, then integrate an inventory management software with that third party warehouse. This is already very complex for a manufacturing plant with zero budget for IT projects and the cheapest IT people needed to keep the lights on.
So customers can only order replacement parts while assembly lines are currently doing production runs?
And comingling parts with completed machines? Heh. You have no idea of the distribution chain of b2b retail goods vs b2c service repair and such.
6-8 weeks repair time is still common, especially nowadays.
Or, if you really want to stamp down about it, you do not allow them to recoup delivery costs and that's their punishment for making an unreliable machine in the first place.
This means simply that parts won't ship and service is only done at approved manufacturer facilities. OH wait...
This was 2018.
International shipping is not even close to being a level playing field:
"Arcane rules established by the 144-year-old Universal Postal Union make it possible for a Chinese e-retailer to send a package across the Pacific to a customer in the U.S. at a cost lower than what an American competitor would spend to ship the same item to a neighboring state"[0]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-18/trump-...
If they all had to provide all the parts at a reasonable cost, they'd figure out a way to get it done. I'm sure Siemens, say, can figure out a way to ship a part by part number efficiently, considering its already on a shelf somewhere.
And if you a company don't want to pay for that? Use a standard part. Now it's not your problem.
It'll never happen, but it's nice to think about as the world drowns in piles of ruined single-use equipment, while the money spent on replacing them flows endlessly corporate pockets.
What’s “too cheap” in your situation is the highly automated, continuous conveyance, mass production line that can take in parts by the container load and pump out fully-functioning dishwashers for less than a week’s wages.
What is the basis for this assetion? What data or information have you used to come to this conclusion?
The last appliance part I bought was the motor for my gas dryer. Several parts places had it. Amazon had the best price by a small amount and I got an exact fit OE motor in 2 days for $114. A year later, that price has soared to $109 and is now available for next-day delivery.
How much less do you think it should possibly cost to be able to order an exact fit ~10 pound, ~1/3 HP dryer motor on a Sunday for Monday delivery? $109 seems like an incredible bargain to me, even if Amazon and Frigidaire pocketed $20 each of pure, obscene profit.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053Y3A8M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...
Problem solved.
But they make it really hard to get the parts.
In 2010 my Fisher-Paykel dishwasher broke. I called the repair service. They charged a little over $100 to tell me that it would cost DKK 6500 ($950) to replace the two broken water softener modules. I spent a long time time searching for a place to buy those modules. Eventually I found a place called Leeds Applicances (closed now) that would sell it to me for £68 + VAT + £20 shipping. I took me maybe 30 minutes to replace the modules, just a lot of connectors and tubes that had to be connected the same way.
Before that I had a dryer that started to make a horrible rattling sound. I refused to just replace the dryer and took it apart. I was some nylon wheel on the belt drive that was worn out. But no one was selling a replacement. I spent about a month complaining to the importer and in the end I went on my bicycle to the Zanussi importer in an industrial area outside Copenhagen and after waiting in their office for a long time I was allowed to buy this piece of nylon for $50. It probably cost less than $1 to produce and they had newer sold one to a consumer before.
Sure, ordering and delivering all the parts separately and individually would be more expensive, but let’s also not pretend that selling and shipping spare parts is prohibitively difficult and costly.
Usually retailers will offer "room of choice" delivery in the UK for these sort of appliances, which means that the dishwasher will be delivered into the house which often requires a 2-person delivery. If you required an item such as a dishwasher to be delivered to a flat for instance, rather than just dropped off curbside outside a block of flats, that would typically require a 2-person delivery in the UK (See services such as DX 2-Man as an example of this type of operation).
Secondly, there is often a requirement for light assembly (i.e. simple installation, removal of packaging, plug in the appliance) which is usually a paid addition by the customer. As soon as you do this, it's often more effective to have all deliveries be 2-person rather than split up the delivery territories (although if you are going through a pallet network, depending on the item and service required, you may be able to split these).
If you don't need this and just want it dropping off outside the customers home (curbside delivery), the cost would usually be c£40 via a pallet network.
The prices I've given are pretty normal commercial prices for a large item delivery to anywhere in the UK (excl. some parts of Scotland).
I gave a 2-person price because I was assuming some sort of 'white glove' service would be required for this, i.e. not just a curbside delivery but there would be an expectation to deliver the item to the kitchen, including if the person lives in a flat for instance. If a 2 person delivery wasn't required, the price would be closer to £40 for a curbside palletised delivery these days.
You might be able to get 15 dishwashers in a van, but delivering to 15 customers in 4 hours is way beyond what is realistic for this type of delivery (you simply won't get the delivery density required). A typical van delivery cost from a regional hub would be c£25-£30, but then you also have to consider the trunking cost from the NDC.
(Logistics is my day job, which is why I have a good idea on the costs of pallet networks, van networks and 2-person delivery networks, all of which I have received recent quotations for or calculated the costs of)
With spare parts, you have to keep the machinery and the knowledge to produce spare parts around for a X years, or make sure your parts won’t degrade for X years, predict how many you’ll need, produce them up-front, and pay for storage.
That worked reasonably well when machines had fairly standard replacement parts. If your part doesn’t change for years, keeping manufacturing knowledge is almost free, and predicting the number of parts needed easier because of the law of large numbers (if you sell ten variants of a design, you may know you’ll need 100,000 ± 10,000 replacement widgets, but for each part that may mean 10,000 ± 5,000, so you’d have to stock 10 × 15,000, knowing you likely won’t need 40,000 of them)
However, current hardware production is very flexible. Making a part slightly different to slightly improve a design is doable (examples in electronics: ASICS, custom battery sizes, custom LCD panels). Do that ten times in a single design, and the resulting device is significantly better.
I think this kind of regulation will trigger a lot of innovation in hardware manufacturing, and may still lead to products that are (slightly) worse if you ignore repairability.
Honestly, I would be very tempted by appliances/cars that said "we've been using these parts for 20 years, and expect to do so forever so replacement parts won't be an issue". I believe some European car makers did that very thing.
Yes, it won't have certain definitions of "better", but repairability is a feature.
Give me a datsun sunny with standardized injerctors and a catalytic converter, then keep making the same thing with the same frame with a drop in standard 100hp electric motor and however many 12V 200Ah drop in lithium batteries I want to carry. If it's unsafe, add a roll cage, and a 5 point harness. If it's still unsafe lower speed limits, design better roads, and only let people who are highly trained drive.
Or a 250cc twin motorbike with 15 hp that weighs 110kg
Or a raileigh pusbike with a 3 speed sun gearbox, drum brakes and a brazed chromolly frame that will still be working after a carbon frame has turned to shards from UV or an alu or hi ten frame is cracked due to corrosion and work hardening and on its 10th drivetrain.
Or the same kettle or toaster or microwave that's been made for decades with simple dials and switches but without changing the shape for no reason or a byzantine menu to reverse engineer back to power and time (the only things that mattere and the interface often used in the 50s).
Make TVs a simple display with a standard mounting point for a standard power supply and a general purpose computer.
This seems like a problem that could be solved by standardizing the parts among multiple models (possibly between different brands), so if legally mandating availability of replacement parts encourages that, it might not be a bad thing.
If you want your own part, you have to either make it available, or you have to make it reliable enough that you don't need to.
That would remind the incentive to have parts that fail be profitable. Making unreliable and unserviceable devices should cost you more.
Let them sell us autonomous cars for $1,000 which need a $5,000 subscribtion to drive. Oh, you want to put child i a car, the car won't start unless you add a child add-on.
Oh, you need to go to the hospital, because your wife is giving birth, that will be extra $5,000 one-time fee.
Of course the sheet metal frame, motor, and controls are the same but on a dumb appliance those rarely fail. on a "Smart" appliance those the replacement "smart" controls can be more costly than the entire replacement unit
Not terribly surprising but I didn't expect everything to be exactly the same across that many know and unknown brands
This can be an advantage as sometimes you can flash default firmware to turn a cheap yumcha monitor into a better one.
Lets be real here, the companies want you to buy a new product, and expensive parts are just one of the parts of planned obsolescence.
It would be 180€ to get it repaired, spare parts are not available even aftermarket/Ali baba/... But then I know I'm going to need to call them once a year or so - so instead we buy a miele which is a higher initial price but longer lifetime in every test a d at least decent reparability.
Put it in the same container as all the others.
Send it to the same retailer.
If one part fails a lot, shove a crate full of those in the same container.
Maximum cost: Add the fraction of your products that need repairs over wholesale.
If lots of machines need repairs you've fucked up and should he paying more or figuring out better logistics.
I think a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part at a time is reasonable. Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one part at a time.
If you want to insist that the sum of the parts costs no more than the MSRP of the dishwasher, you won’t find the parts falling to 1/5 their current cost, but rather the dishwasher now listing for $2500 (and likely having frequent deep-discount sales).
You won't see too many industries attempting this kind of standardization anytime soon.
(Though I don't really disagree that it's generally easier to swap out parts on a (home-built) tower computer than it is with most things because of standards.)
But again to the basic point, it's certainly close to a wash which wouldn't be true with most things.
Not sure about laptops though.
ADDED: I suspect people who say that it's cheaper to build your own PC are mostly thinking in terms of it can certainly be cheaper to upgrade a DIY system than to buy a new one off the shelf.
Of course the big question is, why aren't household devices/appliances using standardized and interchangeable components? In many cases, it could probably be done. I suspect the main differentiator is consumer expectation. A significant number of consumers of bikes and desktop computers will repair, upgrade, and accessorize their purchase. Very few people will expect to do the same with their blender or television.
It came out that the built car costed more than 500% without counting any of the man work/hours.
And FIAT (at least here in Italy) was famous for having rather cheap spare parts (when compared to - say - Volkswagen).
Most probably the 500% is nowadays not enough, at least for cars.
However, what I'm saying is that your cost for just the tree (for the raw material) is greater than the cost of pre-made manufactured and even imported-from-Europe furniture. So you can't save money with DIY furniture building.
I guess I agree, but when I read it I couldn't help but think that Johnny Cash built his Cadillac one part at a time and it didn't cost him a thing!
A 5x multiplier is in no way reasonable unless the replacement parts are being shipped to the moon.
So the cost of assembly line, robots, power and salaries of workers is -400%?
Why do you feel the need to come with excuses for whats is ibviously a cash-cow?
In any case, you've neglected logistics, which is at least complicated enough that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been stalling out on multiple fronts against a much smaller force (this not to denigrate the bravery or capabilities of the Ukranians.)
I am honestly amazed at this segway.
But dishwashers are not that expensive that you're stuck with them. Buying new, cost is less than most new appliances and similar to a phone, less than a laptop. The used market is so soft that, even in my LCOL area (with consequently tighter Craigslist market), I bought my 3 year old stainless steel dishwasher for $150. All this to say, you can bail on your dishwasher if someone starts selling one that is extraordinarily better than everything on the market.
As another thought exercise, you have apartment complexes or apartment buildings (working in hand with national or regional builders). These parties have the time horizon, large sample sizes, accounting capacity, and concern for costs to know the absolute best option for appliances in terms of how often maintenance is required and how much it costs. They're a large enough buyer, at least collectively, to constitute a market. Despite all this, the dishwashers in apartments where I've lived or visited seem exactly the same as the ones in friends homes. Why don't apartment complexes use low maintenance dishwashers? My suspicion is that they're complex machines with heaters (highest wear), pumps (high wear), and pressurized water in close proximity to electronics, built to a standard so they can be affordable in every US home.
But please, make it better. I like paying extra money for things built with engineer driven design.
What is it about sustainability that is wrong to you, why is pollution and resource wasting better?
Dishwashers to me seem quite simple (compared to say washing machines; just based on having repaired all my home appliances). No reason a dishwasher can't last a lifetime.
My mother's first microwave is still going, about 40 years old, meanwhile newer appliances last the mandated 2y warranty period then break very soon after.
We've been seduced by shiny new things and it's pathological for our species. Companies have played to it because those interested in only money have taken them over.
We're in for a World of hurt this Century as energy and resources shortages hit, I wonder if we'll learn.
If you don't believe that mass production has benefits, you have to come up with some alternative explanation for the 20th century.
My preferred modus would be to buy a current manufacturer, then strip out the high paid execs and minimise the profits in the form of very cheap repairs.
our taxes pay for customs to seize components of iPhones and file charges on behalf of apple for counterfeit goods. If you take your iphone, travel to china, take it apart there, and send to to the US by post, the customs will seize it as counterfeit.
Honest people are going to jail to preserve Apple's profits.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3yadk/apple-sued-an-indepen...
You also probably don't know about part serialisation and other efforts that mean that even if you product a compatiable part, the device will reject it.
This is the case with tractors and phones. I am not 100% up to date with dishwashers.
Why not go disrupt them and put some of those cash cows into your barn instead?
On phones, last weekend I replaced my wife's iPhone X battery with one from Amazon for $18.99 + $1.19 in tax and 45 minutes of very straightforward work. If that $20.18 repair to get an extra 2 years out of the phone is the result of excessive profiteering or protectionism on the part of Apple, I'm pretty sure I'm OK with it and don't need/want government intervention to "fix" it.
I could have sent taken it to Apple and gotten it replaced for $70, which also seems totally reasonable to me for a parts-and-labor repair to get 2 more years of service.
A repair company (always 3rd party now) will charge %50 of the machine's price for a trip charge, marked up parts, and labor.
And the number of times I've broken a little plastic tab! How much can it cost to put a extra 0.5mm of plastic in the mould just there? What fraction of a penny was saved and now requires a whole new part, comprising probably at least thousands of times more material plus shipping energy?
The cleverest part was the plastic coupler [0] between the door-connected shaft and motor.
When the system originally locked up, the coupler broke. Consequently after restoring the system, I needed a $9 piece of plastic, rather than a $xxx new motor.
Made me sad that more modern things aren't designed with such value-protective degradation modes.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-Coupler-Chamberlain-Crafts...
https://www.prairielectric.com/blog/how-do-circuit-breakers-...
That said, I noticed LG offered a 10 year warranty on the same motor, so I decided to buy a new dishwasher instead.
My coworker damaged dishwasher seal, no way to buy new seal at all, could only be acquired from another dishwasher of this model. Had to give it for recycling and buy another one.
I just hope this doesn't happen to me, so I always do days of research online before buying a hairdryer...
I wanted to buy a new fridge a couple of years ago, my emphasis/overriding criterion being energy efficiency. I could get actual energy use stats (not mere "A*" or other bullshit "ratings", based on standard models of use) from every manufacturer I looked at, except Samsung. Noooo, Mr Customer, the best we can tell you is "A*". Well fuck that. Guess what make of fridge I didn't buy...
What is a bit of a pain is the standard changed in the last few years, so trying to compare an old energy efficiency label that specifies kwh/year and litres/year against one that's per-cycle is .. hard. They also changed the rating system, so what used to be an A-rated TV is now about a D or E rated one.
And what is also introducing confusion is that they are allowed to sell old models under the old energy label but new models have to apply the new label. So you can have a 2020 model fridge labelled "A+++" but the more energy efficient model 2022 model that replaced it is labeled "D".
There are about 2 models of all-metal scissors.
a Kitchen supply shop will have more than 2 models, some will have plastic but they will be over molded full-tang metal under them, then you can just get scissors designed for something other than kitchen use, lots are out there
That said, plenty of all metal ones exist
Funnily enough, choice was so limited specifically because I didn't want any plastic and I refused to consider the ones on Amazon on general principle, which ruled out the Newness ones and I didn't like the Grunwerg ones because I suspect those over-handles are sintered crap that's barely better than plastic.
So now it's a choice between the ones on Sinplastico, a Chinese brand and a handful of artisan "best of British" brands that were very expensive (and also generally have ostentatiously old-fashioned styling).
Obviously not, but that's how economies of scale, combined with planned obsolescence and rent seeking works.
That's how Apple who makes disposable earphones that last two years is worth trillions and Sennheiser who makes headphones lasting 20+ years is going bust.
It's not profitable making fair priced products that last forever or are cheap and easy to repair.
If Apple had to make headphones that were either robust or repairable (or both, can you imagine), they'd find a way, if only to avoid losing money on replacing broken ones.
Of course, there is obviously a trade off.
TL;DR: Nice strawman ya got there. Would be a shame if it burned down.
Apple is not a company that "makes disposable earphones". AirPods are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of its business. The vast majority of its products can easily last a decade or more and are recyclable after that.
Saying that Apple is worth trillions because of a side product like AirPods is ludicrous. Make your argument without this sloppy, inaccurate Apple-blaming.
Ohh come on... Apple requires them to be shredded, after which some of the base metals can be recovered but there is still a ton of waste in that.
> products can easily last a decade
As long as you are fine with them reducing your battery life to get you to upgrade.
Apple, and the carriers have lots of incentive programs design to get people to "upgrade" the phones and when using those programs those phones go strait to recycle (i.e shredder)
Recycle is the LAST RESORT for sustainability, remember the triad is "REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE" Apple only even plays lip service to the Recycle part, and want to prevent the Reduce and Reuse part by preventing / disincentivizing repair and resell.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q1_Consolidated_Fin...
These regulations are trying to use the state to correct for problems that in some cases occur because the state granted them monopoly protections for their IP. The state could simply not offer those protections to prevent a lot of these issues.
See also a recent comment I wrote on this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363
As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions:
Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product, and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply chains would become even more brittle.
Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make anything new anymore.
The Chitubox people are the counterexample.
Because they exist in a situation without IP restrictions, they are trying to tie everything to subscription and add encryption to the harwdare in order to extract money.
And, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. My personal opinion is that you should be able to get paid for developing good software. However, without IP protections, people can just scarf up your work.
I see this from both the perspective of machine tools and electronic test equipment. Anything under $5K has shit customer support--deal with it. Anything above $25K generally has ok customer support. Anything in between gets crushed out of the market.
The heater pump when originally manufacturer costs £20 because it is done in lots of (tens of?) thousands and assembled in bulk by cheap labour, and shipped in a large container that costs not-a-lot of to move over an ocean.
The replacement part is stored by (potentially) a third-party company that ordered it for £30, by an employee who is paid £40,000 per year, in a warehouse that costs >£100 per square metre to rent (potentially for years), and when requested then has to be delivered by someone paid £20/hour, to be installed by someone paid >£50/hour (with a three hour minimum). And don't forget the VAT.
That one shouldn’t factor into the part price. It’s your choice to hire someone to install the part and at what price vs doing it yourself.
Something like that could be a law. We could allow them a little markup to cover distribution cost, but one could argue it could be that simple.
I do think cars are much better than most items. Maybe not some of the electronics which are all tightly integrated, but certainly the mechanics.
The cost of replacing a key for my wife's car ($1,200) is more than the value of the car.
If she loses her key again, it's cheaper to just buy a new car.
What a strange world we've made.
1. People will either themselves bodge devices together, or get someone else to do so. 2. Companies will find it hard to sell new products if they can all be fixed easily. If the parts have a mark-up, they can be a good revenue stream.
Unfortunately, companies are greedy and still make stuff hard/impossible to repair while charging high mark-ups for what can be.
Funnily enough the second sense does eventually require the first, but not in this accounting period.
I can understand that some businesses overcharge for replacement parts, but otherwise it's also just as understandable that the price is a little bit higher for a part in a model they no longer actively manufacture for sale.
Eh, what? No, they're manufacturing a lot of them to put in the machines already. They only have to manufacture a few more of them, not set up anything specifically at all.
> and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it.
That can't be all that expensive, considering the Ali Baba guys can sell a corresponding part for ten bucks.
I wouldn't trust an Alibaba/Aliexpress part when it comes to the mechanical bits of the car, myself. Not sure if you're American and without WoF/MoT but I'd only go with that stuff for unimportant stuff like trim.
It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
And don't get me started on cars!
If we as species cared about sustainability (we don't), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it's highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.