This is a good point:

The problem isnt that long lasting, durable products no longer exist.

It's that they're no longer marketed for home use.

You can get stuff just as good as back in the '60s, for comparable after-inflation prices. But they don't sell them at Sears or HomeSense, they sell them at industrial or kitchen or office supply stores.

The thing is, if someone decided to stock that toaster on the shelf at Target, it wouldn't sell. Most people make so little toast that the words "duty cycle" or "slices per hour" are not even in their vocabulary. People are simply making purchasing decisions with a higher weight on other criteria.

Maybe, for the environment's sake, people should be buying and using appliances for 70 years. But do people actually want a kitchen full of appliances that are 35 years old on average? Probably not, thrift shops are still full of contemporarily made appliances that were discarded before their useful life ended.

I think that is some of what people miss. Way back when a cheap toaster at Sears was still expensive. Now you have hyper cheap toasters for like $15 bucks now, which would have been a dollar or so back then, you just couldn't get a toaster that price back then. So the cheapest item has drug the average quality down to it.

The reviews suggest this $250 toaster isn't any better:

"was hoping it lasted longer & would be better quality but was disappointed" "All the coils do no not glow and It toasts unevenly" "one side stops working after 6 months or so. I’ve gone through three of these" "Bought two of these toasters both stopped working" "Have to replace this toaster about once a year, one side will always stop working" "Lasted me about a month or so and it no longer works". "Died so quickly!"

I think this is a perfect example of the problem. There is a market for $250 toasters, but even for that price you can't buy a reliable toaster.

The site has other well reviewed toasters at similar prices, I picked that one because it was exactly the price being discussed.

Either way, the bathtub curve of product failure still applies no matter the price point.

Bear in mind that people on this site are using toasters at duty cycles hundreds to thousands of times higher than home users. 6 months of commercial use of one of these toasters could very easily be a lifetime of use for a single home.