Thinking back to when I was younger even at my age (late twenties) I remember things being made more durable and lasting longer… What the f*ck happened? Nothing broke or anything, I was just reading an article about it and I took a look around me, I usually buy very durable stuff, but when I think of most people, they typically buy the cheapest stuff that looks good, without caring about its durability. God forbid somebody accidentally sits on a night stand or stool these days that is made out of particleboard or MDF. Even the cars feels cheaper and less durable. Sure they have better safety mechanisms but that seems like it was done so that car manufacturers could get away with using ever cheaper material instead of durable stuff. I remember realizing this when walking through target and looking at the furniture… futons with the frame made of particleboard? seriously? I bought a wal mart futon with a metal frame because at least that has potential for lasting longer.
So what’s the skinny on this? Are manufacturers just trying to skimp out to save money while selling at ever expanding prices? It seems to me that furniture is the cheapest thing made these days, it seems as if the raw materials to build a couch is dirt cheap, a 12’ 2x6 pine board costs under 10 dollars! More than enough for a frame for a couch, if its assembly line production, even with employee overhead $699 for a loveseat built with particleboard seems a little much. I understand they employ the costs of shipping, employees etc… it just seems like the last 10-15 years everything has been manufactured or built by the lowest bidder, everything seems so cheap. Whats worse is some people can’t tell the difference between good quality and bad and will pay the same price, and it seems companies prey on them. Anyone else feel this way? Anyone maybe know of a furniture company that uses really wood and not just sawdust, veneer and glue that actually makes affordable and quality furniture? How about car companies (I stick to Chevy because, they “feel” more durable to me than others)? Even houses piss me off, even though I have it all over, I even feel like gypsum/drywall board is a scam… “lets sell powdered rock in between two pieces of paper!” Why the hell is everything so flimsy, even the damn tray table on airplanes feel like something you could buy at a Dollar Store.:mad::mad::mad:
Damn, I feel much better complaining about this. I can’t imagine so, but I apologize if anyone is offended by my rant.
My car is ten years old. In the 1950s most ten year old cars were spending half their time in a repair shop. I have done nothing but routine repairs on my current car. Mainly replaced the battery and made many changes of oil. I do drive much less than average (about 2000 miles a year).
One thing I noticed is that prices are dropping. I just bought a stove that cost the same dollar price as the one I bought 30 years earlier. I am sure that is less then half the price in constant dollars. I don’t expect it will last 30 years, but then neither will I.
You went off the rails on this one. Cars are more reliable, safer and more durable than ever. Would you really buy a 1950’s - 1980’s car today. Knock yourself out. They are still available in mint condition. Only a fool would buy one to use as a daily driver though because they were horrible except for some of the styling. Lots of rusting steel combined with a temperamental carburetor and shitty brakes are not my idea of a good time. 100,000 miles used to be something to aspire to like climbing Mt. Everest. Now it is just a break-in period.
I think you are confusing heft with actual quality. Performance was really bad too. Remember all of those 1960’s - 1970’s muscle cars that people lusted after. They made a lot of noise for sure but they were generally slow as molasses. I could destroy most of them with my Toyota Rav4 family hauler or just about any modern sedan.
Everything, and I do mean everything is more efficient than it was in 1950. You get more and pay less. Often vastly more for vastly less.
What you’re mostly seeing is that middle class wages haven’t kept up with some prices that have increased. In general those things that have gotten more expensive in number of dollars are vastly more capable than earlier models that cost fewer dollars. So on a bang for buck basis they’re less expensive even though on a sticker price basis they’re more expensive. And compared to your ever shrinking wages they’re doubly more expensive.
Another factor is the growth of the lower class who buys new merchandise. Back in the 1960s probably half of America never bought new furniture or appliances; they couldn’t afford them. They expected to buy only used stuff. Now we (China actually) have the ability to make new stuff cheap enough for those folks to buy new. So they do. But yes, it’s really cheap non-durable stuff.
Never confuse heavy with strong or useful. A 1960s toaster weighed 10 lbs. A 2017 toaster weighs 2 lbs. The difference is 8 lbs of wasted steel that did nothing to toast the bread better, nor make the toaster last longer.
A lot of it is survivor bias. If you see a 1960s toaster at a garage sale you think “Wow, they don’t make them like that any more! Those old appliances last like tanks.” What you should be thinking is “One of every million 1960s toasters lasted this long. I’ve just found that one (assuming it still works); the rest died decades ago and are long since rusted to nothing in a landfill someplace.” That’s what’s really going on.
Contrived durability - here’s the Wikipedia entry under planned obsolescence.
“Contrived durability is a strategy of shortening the product lifetime before it is released onto the market, by designing it to deteriorate quickly.”
I’m far from an expert on this topic, but my suspicion is that there are various psychological factors at work:
(1) We don’t remember the cheap crap we bought in the 1950s that broke, we just remember the things we bought in the 1950s that lasted for decades. So we’re comparing current stuff to the cream of old stuff
(2) And for lots of things you can buy today, say, a hammer, you can pay $5 and get a cheap made-in-XXX hammer that will break in a year, or you can buy a $50 hammer that will last forever. But I’m very very VERY skeptical that no one in the world is currently manufacturing an actual high-quality hammer.
I recently replaced my kitchen pipes with PVC. I did the bathroom 2 or so years ago. Yeah, plastic is “cheaper,” but it beats having to deal with pipe crud because the pipes rusted through, and PVC doesn’t run the chance of requiring Hulk strength and PB Blaster or Kroil.
An important factor indeed. There are still high quality products, but the financially-left-behind LMC shopper will be buying cheap plastic/particleboard crap rather than expensive quality product because that’s what he can afford; and because buyers drive the mass market down by shopping for price, the makers of high quality product have to either race to the bottom, go out of business, or become premium-niche sellers.
*“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” *
I think a big factor is people stop caring about quality. They may claim to care but when you offer shoppers a choice between well-made and cheap, they pick cheap.
The people who are making and selling the products have reason to prefer this view. If buyers insisted on durability, the sellers would deliver it - but they’d realize sales would be few and far between. Buyers who go for cheapness keep rebuying the same product on a regular basis.
This is a large piece of it. When we replaced our thirty-year-old refrigerator, I jokingly asked him if he thought the new one would last thirty years. I didn’t expect it would, but I didn’t figure on him telling me that refrigerators are designed to only last seven years. It’s an expensive POS and I miss the sturdier old one. Plus there’s all that material in the landfill and demand for plastic from China (which is looking to pollute our environment by producing the raw material here).
I’ve been thinking that way for a while and after reading these posts, I am pretty convinced otherwise. It makes sense, especially since my Cavalier beat a Chevelle without much effort one time. I think what I do have is that “Survivor Bias” as LSLGUY noted. Also I didn’t think about something so simple as confusing “heft” with quality… I was just in an irate mood last night and felt like whining about something. Thanks for the replies… But I am curious if anyone knows of anything that Hasn’t improved in quality throughout the years. I have to say Washing machines (eye of beholder deal here) and refrigerators are a good start, although I can say having an Asbestos lined refrigerator is not a goal of mine. Any ideas?
I gotta say, I’m a bit skeptical. Who is the guy here? Someone who actually works in refrigerator R&D?
Because I find it a bit hard to believe that in this day and age of wikileaks there are large corporations which are, not just designing something so they hope it won’t fail for at least 7 years, but actively designing something so it WILL fail after 7 years. Particularly given that, if you buy a fridge, and then after 7 years it breaks, are you going to buy that same brand of fridge again?
Maybe I’m being insufficiently cynical here… I’ve certainly heard that US automakers used to do such things… and then they got their asses kicked, so you’d hope a lesson would have been learned.
Like so many of the others, I’ll say that cars are more durable. I’m a professional in the field, for what it’s worth. Growing up, I remember air leaks and dust intrusion and having to trash a car at its end-of-life 100,000 miles. These days a car will last up to 250,000 miles, or more, depending on the quality of your roads.
However, other than cars, there’s a good point made by the O.P. I just returned from camping. My cousin’s awning, for example, is super light weight, but the load bearing poles are pieces of shit. One strong wind will bend them out of usability. Instead of having strong poles, they tied everything down with after-market corkscrew stakes and cargo straps.
My patio furniture is crap. I’d pay for wrought iron if it were available, but the race to the bottom means that I have crappy aluminum extruded-like junk.
The thing is, manufacturers aren’t guilty; the buying public is guilty, because they’re uninformed and want only the least expensive thing they can purchase. The market simply responds, and there aren’t enough people willing to pay for quality.
Don’t get me started on air travel, where the same race to the bottom applies because of idiots fretting over a $20 fare difference, ruining things for all of us.
Chiming in on cars: my 15-year-old BMW has no rust, no rattles, and no repairs much beyond what an older German car requires. The 60s thru 80s shitbombs I grew up with were junk heaps when they reached 5-6 years. Moreover, modern Japanese cars last forever these days.
I do think houses were built vastly better. I don’t know the reasons newer homes suck, I’ve friends whose new condos/McMansions are falling apart in very expensive ways. Our house is going on a 100yo and solid as a rock.
I made a recent thread. TL;DR is it’s not so much that the cooling part of the fridge will go, but that the interior hardware can turn to crap in at least cheaper models, and the price of a new fridge is less that you’d probably pay to replace all the furniture.
I think the car thing is right. A new car in an unreliable model might last longer than older cars, but only as far as you’re willing to keep it up.
Right. The lower, and larger, end of the mass market makes suppliers compete on end price virtually to the exclusion of other criteria. OTOH Air Travel in our time is extraordinarly safe, and available to more people, even if it has been turned into a test of endurance of indignities.
And as **silenus **quoted, there is a vicious cycle effect at work. It can be hard to husband your resources to invest in quality, when you have an immediate need ***now ***for a pair of boots or a washing machine or a set of tires and have to grab what you can afford now.
Yup, my 84 Tempo was ruining me on repairs by the time 90 rolled in.
My former 99 Camry and 09 Accord are running strong with only reasonable repairs.
Heck, already by the mid-20th century you had the notion of “little boxes of ticky-tacky” in the culture’s view of housing developments. The difference is that now we are getting* big, expensive *boxes of ticky-tacky. One hundred+ years ago, *he who could afford it *had a home built to have it be in the family for generations to come with just regular maintenance and the Ship-of-Theseus effect, and just to be safe it would be “overbuilt” – thicker beams, closer-together joists; heavier aggregate and more rebar in concrete; etc. If what you could afford that way was a 1200 square foot home, well, fine. If you could not afford it then you just had to settle for less. Today, the market offers putting you in a home twice and a half as big, that to be fair *does *meet the newer construction codes, but does so just exactly to the hundredth of whatever the unit and at the least expense possible, but hey, it’s in the right school district!
I love all of these viewpoints on it, really gives a different perspective on things. Definitely convinced about the cars, maybe I just feel that the old clunkers were just roomier and hefty, I dunno. I do think houses are built really cheap these days, with the lowest quality of materials…actually I know this as I was part of some renovation stuff (work) for a while until I quit (too many hours, cut into my gaming). It was amazing what they build with and what they sell for. I suppose I understand it, when it relates to cost and affordability for the buyer but it still sucks!