repair of things: what happened?

Factual Questions
1

Once upon a time, people used to take whatever item they had, that was malfunctioning, or broken, or damaged to have it repaired…

common examples:

televisions
radios
small appliances
power tools
furniture
shoes
etc etc… just everyday ordinary things…

While there are still places and people who repair things, this seems to have become an “endangered species.”

What happened? Why is it so nonchalant these days to toss out a messed up thingamabob or whatsit, and go but a new one, instead of taking the original to be repaired? What killed the fix-it industry? It sickens me to see how much we Americans waste.

2
3

In most cases, it’s cheaper to buy a new item than to repair an old one. Repairing stuff takes a lot of labor, in most cases, and the labor has to be trained. I’m not saying this is right, mind you, I’m just saying that this is how it is. I, personally, have been known to darn clothing rather than pitch it and buy new. But I hate clothes shopping, and I can darn while watching a movie.

4

Well, some years ago, I considered getting a thingamabob repaired. I think it was a tape player. The guy I talked to at the place that did repairs said I’d have to pay such and such an amount for them to look the thing over and determine if it could be repaired. Then, if it could be, that would cost an additional, unpredictable, amount.

I discarded the thing and eventually bought a new one.

It seemed to me that looking the thing over to see if it could be fixed is not something for which a fee should be charged.

Suppose I ask several contractors for an estimate on a job. One will get the job, the others won’t. Whatever time and effort they took in preparing the estimate is time and effort they’re just out. Unless I’m wrong? I don’t think one normally pays a fee to get an estimate?

Likewise, I can go into a shoestore, spend an hour trying on shoes, and leave, buying nothing. The shoestore gets nothing for the time and effort its employee put in bringing shoes from stock and then putting them back.

There are lots of things a businessperson does that they don’t get paid for. I think looking something over to see if it can be repaired is one of these things.

I think these fees are one reason for the decline in getting things repaired.

5

Easy. Low-cost imported goods, shoddy construction, and “solid state” electronics.

For example, in an old TV, one could pull an assortment of vacuum tubes out, test them, and replace the faulty one. In a modern TV, if some random component dies on the “motherboard”, it’d take an expert many hours to find the damaged part, and it would then have to be unsoldered, and the replacement resoldered in it’s place.

Highly skilled labor charge, five hours plus parts, $285. Cost of replacement TV, $250.

In modern VCRs, the gears and drive linkages are all plastic. If a gear strips or some bracket breaks, replacement parts simply are not available. The factory simply doesn’t sell individual parts. (Besides, would you like to explain to some factory guy in China or Taiwan that you need that little black lever at the back of the cassette-lifting mechanism that trips the capstan preload arm?)

In that case, it can’t BE repaired, unless the repair shop happens to have a duplicate on the scrap pile that doesn’t ALSO have a stripped gear.

In the case of some things, the damage occurs to the main casing, typically plastic. For example, I once tried to fix an old Black & Decker drill. The brushes had worn, and I thought it was an easy fix. Except the worn brushes had heated up and gotten crosswise, and both melted and cracked the body halves. Since B&D doesn’t sell the body sections- and if they did, they’d be 3/4 of the cost of a new drill- it was essentially unrepairable.

Furniture… heck, there’s a subject long enough for a book. The steel framework that holds and operates things like the footrest and recliner mechanism, typically uses a simple stepped rivet, rather than a hinge. That rivet eventually comes loose and it breaks or binds. The wooden framework for the rest of the chair or couch is so thin and of such poor wood that if you went in to try and fix it, there’s no wood left to drive another screw into- it’s all splintered and cracked.

Now, in all of these cases, a sufficiently talented individual with the right tools and knowhow, can fix many of these things. But he or she is not typically charging oneself… Were you to have a professional do it, again, chances are the cost of the fix exceeds the value of the object in question.

Personally, I’ve fixed a great many things. Including one or two things that weren’t designed to be taken apart (riveted or welded shut, for example.) But I’ve also occasionally chunked the old part and simply spent the cash to replace it too.

On a whole, I also firmly believe that there are fewer do-it-yourselfers, comparatively speaking, than there were years ago. An example of this is that recent news piece in which one of the top TV news personalities- who’s been on the air for decades- stated he has no idea how the TV picture gets from the studio to the individual TV set.

6

It’s called ‘planned obsolesce’ & the idea has been around for decades.

Don’t forget we have warrentees these days, too. If people didn’t bring them into the shop still, why would we have warrentees?

7

Don’t forget that things are much cheaper now to buy in comparison to years ago and ,has been said before, you can spend more in getting it repaired than replacing it. Last week we bought a new iron. It cost £15-00 and the shop tried to sell us a repair warranty for £9-00. As there was a manufacurer’s warranty for one yearit will be cheaper to buy a new iron if it goes wrong after after a couple of years.

8

In order to get maximum appeal to consumers at the point of sale, a product must usually be made as inexpensively as possible. Things don’t last as long as they used to, and the result is that more new products must be purchased. My personal experience with electronics (I repaired them for 12 years, but I’m speaking as a consumer here) is that things manufactured more than 6 or 8 years ago tend to still be around, and working just fine. Things made more recently are breaking within just a few years after sale. I have the first CD player that Technics ever made- it must be 20 years old now. It still runs fine. But when I was in service, I would routinely see virtually new (only a year or two old) product that had already failed due to cheap manufacturing (e.g. plastic parts breaking under normal stress). I also saw a lot of service bulletins from manufacturers issued within the first year of an item’s availability to address some major catastrophic failure issue due to poor design and cheap parts.

Ideally, the manufacturer would probably love it if the product failed the day after the warranty expired. After all, they only guaranteed it for a year, so why are you complaining? Granted, short-lived electronics may cost the manufacturer in consumer loyalty, but the impact is probably inversley proportionate to the cost of the item. Therein lies the deadly spiral:

  1. Build a thing cheaper (less expensive) and more people will buy it.
  2. The more people that buy, the more profit we make.
  3. If it’s less expensive in the first place, people won’t have a good reason to be upset when it breaks. Hey it was cheap right? Whaddayas expect?
  4. See how cheaply the thing can be built without compromising consumer loyalty & still generating good sales.

As to the labor issue, yes the assembly line labor (initial construction) is cheaper that the highly skilled repair technician labor. Add to the cost of the technician’s labor, the cost of the company the employs her. The cost of the assembly line drone (or robot) is covered by initial sales. And for reasons I’ve already stated in another thread, the sale of parts has become a big money making business all by itself, which makes repairs more expensive if the repair requires parts.

I agree. A few weeks ago I went to the doctor and he didn’t do squat. He looked me over for maybe 5 minutes, asked me a couple of questions and then charged me $10 and my insurance company $100. All I got for that was a statement such as “it’s probably such-and-such condition”, and left his office feeling just as bad as when I arrived.

Silly me of course. There are certain professionals who’s opinion you pay for. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a correct diagnosis and you’ll still pay for it.

Suppose you go to an auction to bid on a painting. You bid aggressively but in the end you are outbid. Whatever time and effort you took in going to the auction is time and effort you’re just out. It’s a risk you took, nothing more. If there is a chance they’ll get the contract, they’ll take the risk in showing up at your house, even though they may be outbid by other contractors. And to make the bid as agressive as possible, the contractors charge nothing up front. If they did, you’d call other contractors who didn’t charge for estimates.

They’re simply compeeting against each other to see who will promise to provide the service you want at the lowest price.

Whether or not a fee is charged for an estimate is simply a matter of company policy & is driven by the free market thingy. A contractor can give you an estimate over the phone if he likes. I’ve had painters do this when trying to get an estimate on painting my building.

9

Another factor is that repair generally requires that the product be designed to be repairable in the first place. It’s cheaper to manufacture in such a way that things can’t even be taken apart for repair. This is a different issue than the materials being shoddy or poor design leading to the item breaking in the first place. It’s an engineering decision to cut costs by not designing in access, or using cheaper “permanent seal” manufacturing processes rather than screwing things together so that they can be taken apart.

Your old vacuum tube TV also used point-to-point wiring, and everything was a discrete component. Printed circuit boards and integrated circuits have also contributed to the “non-repairability” of consumer electronics. Of course, these things are also part of the reason why the purely electronic parts of devices have generally gotten cheaper and more reliable.

Usually, what goes on the fritz is some mechanical thing like a switch. Which was glued into the plastic case in a slot molded for exactly that switch, rather than being screwed to a panel in such a way that would allow replacement with a generic switch. Note that this sort of thing is what has allowed so many modern products to be so compact, also - if the stuff actually screwed together it would have to be larger and seem “clunkier” to the consumer. It’s partially a tradeoff we have conciously bought into by finding smaller, more compact devices desirable.

10

I don’t agree with the above.
Non-billable time is just like any other cost and needs to be paid for by the customer.

Fee for diagnosis vs. free estimates = Pay me now or pay me later.

Businesses don’t just loose the money involved in non-billable time it’s handled like loss/theft, or any other overhead item and added back into the price of the job.

11

I am one of those old fashioned guys who hates to toss anything away and if something can be fixed for a reasonable cost I’ll fix it. It just seems to happen fairly often that replacing the entire item is cheaper than the cost of repairs, here’s an example.

Our coffee maker quit working the other day - the warranty expired a year ago. If we were to take it in and have the element replaced it would have cost us way more than the cost of a new coffee maker.

I did do some checking and discovered that the old coffee maker had been recalled and in a few weeks we should be getting a full refund.

12

Manufacturers also seem to redefine what is considered defective. Several years ago I bought a new VCR and the clock gained about 12 minutes per month. I brought it in to get it fixed under warranty and they replaced the display (why??) the clock’s board and some other controller. In the end the best they could get was the clock losing about 6 minutes per month. It took them over a month to get the VCR to that point and when I complained they pointed out that the clock is within the manufacturer’s minimum requirements for accuracy and no further work would be done on it. I still have my first VCR that I bought in 1990 and it works great.

Some furniture can still be repaired. This doesn’t usually apply to the type you get from Target or Walmart. If you pay for a better piece of furniture you get durability and the potential for repairing it. Cheap sofas can’t be readily re-upholstered, but one from (for example) Ethan Allen can be recovered.

13

as an aside:

giving a price to paint a house vs diagnosing a problem in a computer [for instance].

a house estimate takes ten minutes of walking around, and thirty minutes of talking to the homeowner. compared to the labor and pay for getting the job, the cost of making the estimate is a small one. and the owner is generally going to actually pay someone to do the work.

diagnosing a problem is generally the hard part of the job. people may decide not to have it fixed once they know the cost, but learning whether it is fixable can take some real time.

why there are no repair shops: we have most things built on cost-efficeint assembly lines in places where wages are very low. to repair it is done by skilled workers in areas where wages are much higher. in third world countries there are still repair shops for bout anything you can name, including shoes.

14

Also add the cost of manufacturing replacement parts,warehousing same and the cost of shipping.
Lets say you’ve bought a 50.00 gidget. The whatchamacallit cost .50 to mfgr.
Someone buys 6000 extra whatchamacallits. they ship them to their warehouse
they store them. Time passes.
They employ people to run the warehouse. You troubleshoot and find you need a whatchamacallit.
you order whaychamacallit. they recieve your order.
they ship same.$

So your $.50 part now costs $10.00

You install part.$
$35.00 per hour min labor $15.00
You just can’t afford to fix them.

15

very interesting, and definitely not the type of answers I would have imagined. Thanks

Two more questions:

(a) What everyday items are still manufactured to BE repairable?
(b)Do manufacturers deliberately manufacture products in such a way so the item will fail and expire in certain amount of time? I seem to pick up minor ambience of just that, in the above statements…

(speculative statement follows and is not based on facts) INOW, for example, say I buy a brand new tv. ACME tv co. deliberately has built the tv in such a way that in, lets say, 4 years, the tv will die and I will have to go buy a new one. Company product sabotage for perpetuation of company profit?

16

Another factor in repairability is that in many cases it now costs extra development/fabrication money to make something repairable. Something like a car is deliberately (and very expensively) made repairable. Things that can be expected to be upgraded are repairable (such as computers). Professional cameras are repairable because a particular camera and lens become so much a part of the photographic process pros don’t want to change their equipment.

Naturally some manufacturer’s build things to fall apart in a set period of time. It depends on whether they can get away with it. Thanks to consumer magazines that’s harder to do.

17

partly_warmer, slight correction to your post. You remember those ads a couple of years ago bragging that brand X car didn’t need a “tune up” for at least 100,000 miles? There’s a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with improved manufacturing techniques. In order to make cars smaller (and thus more fuel efficient) automakers have taken to doing some rather strange things with where they put things. (On some Chrysler’s the only way to get to the battery is to remove one of the front wheels! On some Oldsmobile models its under the back seat!) Those cars that didn’t need the tune up had platinum plugs which are supposed to be good for 100,000 miles. They used those plugs because the engine had to be squeezed into an almost non-existant engine bay and access to the plugs was blocked by the top part of the engine. So in order to pull the plugs, you’d have to remove the top of the engine. Not something easy or inexpensive to do. Of course, it created another problem as well. Leaving plugs in for 100,000 miles can cause them to “weld” themselves to the block, which is very costly and expensive to repair (about the same as a new engine).

Another problem I’ve noticed with automotive designs is that a component will be located on the engine in a place that’s easy to get to when its on the assembly-line, but well-nigh impossible to get to when its in the car. My Honda’s a perfect example. You can only change the alternator after pulling the left CV Joint! Fortunately, both went out on me at the same time, otherwise…

18

Tuckerfan:

Well, that’s not really the whole story. Modern cars can go 100K between tuneups because of two things: electronic ignitions and fuel injection. Both of these system, in terms of auto repair, were nothing short of revolutionary.

Ignition systems used to have ‘points’ which were mechanical switches which opened & closed literally thousands of times a minute. Naturally they wore out quickly. They were also highly vulnerable to moisture and even rust. Although it took a few years, electronic ignition system are pretty much totally reliable, especially compared to the old systems.

Fuel injection was just the natural evolution of the carburator, and a very welcome one! I laugh when I hear someone say that carburators were better. They weren’t. A carburator is to FI what an adding machine is to a computer. FI delivers fuel in a precisely controlled and accurate way. A carburator is basically fuel injection controlled by levers and diaphrams and pulleys and steam!

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Oh, and in regards to the OP, two words: cheap labor. On a per unit cost it is simply much cheaper to make a million of something than it is to repair one.

And its not all bad. I remember when 19" TVs were all $350. Now, all 19" TVs have a better picture, electronic tuning, and a remote and cost only $199.

20

MSK, you asked what can still be fixed. Large projection TVs, microwaves, dishwasher, refrigerators, washers and dryers, ovens, and other ‘major’ appliances can generally still be serviced, as well as items that are largely mechanical, such as mowers, tractors, and cars. It’s generally only highly specialized electronics that are nearly impossible to repair.

More and more, cars are becoming less mechanical and more electrical, however, so I can see ‘disposable’ cars at some point in the distant future, I think many European mini-car and electric car models begin to approach this level of disposability. In the LS1 powerplant used in the Vettes and Camaros, you have to pull the engine to change the plugs or distributor. The distributor alone costs about $400, not to mention the cost of pulling the engine. Vehicles are also designed and built largely by computers and robots, respectively which allow for MUCH closer tolerances than a human, which means they last longer. The downside of closer tolerances, however, is more dramatic damage caused when they fail, as shown by Tuckerfan.

As for your alternator and CV joint going out at the same time, Tuckerfan, I can probably explain that. Your CV joint boot likely split and spewed grease all over the place, including the guts of the alternator, shorting or severly limiting the life of your alternator. I’d bet money on it.

–Tim