this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Yeah, it's a common fallacy in appliance brand discussions: "my grandma has a and it still works! You should buy one, too!". First of all it's survivorship bias and almost always the quality has degraded a lot in the past decades (greed and consumers that don't want to pay the price for reliable appliances).
Also, it's not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It's just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It's enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
It's probably a bit of both here. We didn't have the "disposable" lifestyle 50 years ago that we have now, and a stronger push for efficiency and features has had trade-offs in complexity and reliability.
Example: My current dryer (and my dad's new dryer) both have a lot more plastic in them. The motors are smaller, and quieter, while making the same power (or more). They are loaded with temp, humidity, weight and wobble sensors, and my dryer has 4 dials, 5 different temperatures, and 2 different modes. The old one, had a dial to control the heat, and a timer.
As for disposable, I think older generations had an expectancy that you would buy an appliance once or twice in your life. I've got a 1000 dollar poket shit-posting device that I'm going to get rid of because it is pushing 4 years old. We just accept that these devices are uneconomical to repair, and we toss them out. I think the only things American's bother to fix anymore are cars, and that's going away because every year, they get harder and more expensive to repair.