For groceries, Hofer (Aldi Süd) kinda does that where i live. They sell very basic, barely-processed food from no-name brands. Stuff typically costs about half (or at least it feels like it to me) of what you’d spend in other supermarkets, where they sell highly-processed foods (think fast food and such).
For those like me who actually didn’t know:
Initial Public Offering. It’s the first time (initial) the company sells shares (offering) on public stock exchanges. Aka: they went public.
Miele is the GOAT. Love our Miele appliances. All of them are now 15 years old and not a single problem. Buying the 10 year warranty was a waste. Buy once, cry once. Only appliances I would consider are Miele and Bosch Benchmark.
I bought a Bosch dishwasher because of this reputation, and I hate it.
The drying function is a joke. Everything plastic comes out with water still all over it. My Maytag (which admittedly died) used to dry everything perfectly.
Also the racks on the Bosch are poorly organized. It’s always a challenge to find places to fit everything.
Miele was sold to a private equity firm and they’ve been reputation-fracking, so their recent stuff is supposed to be pretty mediocre but priced as if it’s top-end.
The cheapest LG refrigerators that are 2 door freezer on top are pretty well regarded. Their more expensive refrigerators have linear compressors that aren’t a great design to begin with and an even worse design for the refrigerant used in the USA compared to the refrigerant they were designed for in Korea. (As I understand it)
It’s kind of crazy that like heating air is not perfectly mastered in every stove, heating and pumping water in every dishwasher and laundry machine etc. It’s very simple stuff after all.
How fuckin cheap du you have to be to make a non perfect machine 🤷🏻♀️?!
My burner igniters aren’t electronic-control and they still failed in a less than decade old stove that was not heavily used at all (I live alone and use the stove, not even the specific burners that failed, maaaaaaaaybe monthly)
They just make their parts cheap overall. Induction isn’t enshittification-proof. If anything it’s more susceptible, being entirely electronic.
That said I’d trade my gas stove for induction if I could, even with enshittification.
Also second hand lab equipment. I was tired of my kitchen scale breaking and having annoying features like auto off after like 60 seconds. Got an ohaus lab scale off eBay for like $50, handles 18lbs, has a configuration menu with tons of options and features like count mode, sequential weight summing, and lets you set auto off for up to 30 minutes or completely disable auto off. Takes regular AAs or plugs into an outlet. I love it and it’s built like a tank.
Man, having worked in a couple research labs in a previous life, there’s no way I’d use a used lab scale for food. Especially when $50 will actually get you a pretty decent scale that has not been potentially used for weighing everything from diseased mice to stool samples to unidentified precipitates from a failed chemical reaction.
Since you’re here to type this, it was probably not used for anything too nasty, but I do not endorse that as a way to save a few bucks!
Idk worrying about a lab leak type pathogen scenario through an ebay sale seems far fetched to me. I picked one that looked lightly used and clean and wiped it down with disinfectant when I got it. The chance of a pathogen surviving that long doesn’t sound like a realistic concern. Most things it plausibly would have been exposed to, save for like highly radioactive dust getting lodged in its crevices, is easily handled with basic sanitation and hand washing. And it’s not like I’m putting food on the surface anyways.
In general anything made for businesses. They might be fine with us having stuff that doesn’t work, but businesses still need things that work to produce things that don’t.
The first one was 2 weeks outside of warranty, the second one we’re currently waiting on the manufacturer and their mechanic. It’s a whole thing but it’s looking like it might be a refund at this point since it’s taking so long for them to even come look at it.
The first one wasn’t repaired because the part was back-ordered and by the time we repaired it it wouldve ended up costing the same as a new one.
$1700 for a seven-year warranty. How much you want to bet it’s specifically engineered to last no more than eight years?
The water heater that came with my house I bought in '98 lasted 20 years. I replaced it with the best I could afford at the time, which had a seven-year warranty. It lasted just over seven years. I replaced that one a couple of months ago with the longest warranty one I could find, which is twelve years. I know I’ll be replacing it in twelve years.
One thing to note is that planned obsolescence for machines is not something that is easy to do to the level that you’re describing it.
Even if they use substandard materials at specific junctures with an estimated wearout time limit, there’s always the chance that a manufacturing flaw can increase the time between breakdowns
I think a good follow-up plan would be something more like finding the parts that break down and then digitizing them and then contracting with a service like JLCPCB to manufacture those individual parts on demand.
You could probably start a fairly successful company on just that if you had the time and energy to get the whole process rolling.
A combination of a SLS 3D printer to make the parts out of metal, or, you know, really high-quality 3D printer to make them out of nylon or whatever plastic is necessary, and getting the appropriate springs and levers and bearings and everything to fill in the gaps, you probably could make a nice side business for yourself just custom making the parts that break down the most often for appliances.
My cousin had a coin operated speed queen washer when I briefly lived with her. The laundromat was getting rid of it not due to functioning, but because it would cost too much to retrofit it to use credit or bills, when it was already quite old.
You could use coins to make it work, but the panel was missing and you’d just stick your hand in and flip the switch. Always felt like you’d electrocute yourself.
Sucker ran great and she was doing 2 loads a day minimum (clearly no understanding of birth control, but she got her tubes tied after the 6th kid came out, so…)
She got it for far less than the price of a new bare-bones machine, so that could be a great option for anyone who may want one!
Yeah I was gonna say you can do this today by looking for the company that only makes whatever it is you’re trying to buy and costs double what you expect to spend on it based on the competition.
If you want something that lasts, you generally need to pay for it.
(Though if you get the opportunity, ask someone who repairs the thing you’re trying to buy what the best brand is, they’re the people that know)
Yup, the whole, “They don’t make things the way they used to,” thing is part survivorship bias, and part people not understanding that appliances used to be very major purchases.
If you spent the equivalent of what they cost back then, you’ll get an appliance that lasts decades.
Adding to this: just call around to different repair shops for the product you’re shopping for and ask them. Not only might you get some great advice, but you’ll also get an idea of who to call when you do need their services. How they respond when they know you’re not spending any money is a pretty good indicator of their true customer service.
This often actually exists still, but those companies dont do big marketing and their products will cost 3x that of a “normal” one.
For groceries, Hofer (Aldi Süd) kinda does that where i live. They sell very basic, barely-processed food from no-name brands. Stuff typically costs about half (or at least it feels like it to me) of what you’d spend in other supermarkets, where they sell highly-processed foods (think fast food and such).
As I’ve heard it:
and Mielemake the best stoves and fridgesAnd yes, they are all very expensive. But I want to get me a Speed Queen so bad.
Speed Queen IPOd recently. Make of that what you will.
They overdosed on Internet Protocol‽ /s
For those like me who actually didn’t know: Initial Public Offering. It’s the first time (initial) the company sells shares (offering) on public stock exchanges. Aka: they went public.
Miele is the GOAT. Love our Miele appliances. All of them are now 15 years old and not a single problem. Buying the 10 year warranty was a waste. Buy once, cry once. Only appliances I would consider are Miele and Bosch Benchmark.
I bought a Bosch dishwasher because of this reputation, and I hate it.
The drying function is a joke. Everything plastic comes out with water still all over it. My Maytag (which admittedly died) used to dry everything perfectly.
Also the racks on the Bosch are poorly organized. It’s always a challenge to find places to fit everything.
Not to mention that newer low end Bosch dishwashers require an account and app for some functionality.
High end ones do too if you want to access all of the wash features; they can’t be entirely programmed from the device itself.
Miele was sold to a private equity firm and they’ve been reputation-fracking, so their recent stuff is supposed to be pretty mediocre but priced as if it’s top-end.That’s not true at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miele
Do you have a source for that? Their wiki page says that they are still family owned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miele
I do not - I’ve heard it so many times from so many places that I didn’t bother checking it before repeating it, but it looks like it was wrong.
Damn. I hate to hear that. Guess I’ll scratch them off my list.
Cafe (spinoff from GE) does a pretty good job with stoves. AFAIK they are still pretty well respected.
The brands to stay away from at all costs are LG and Samsung.
The cheapest LG refrigerators that are 2 door freezer on top are pretty well regarded. Their more expensive refrigerators have linear compressors that aren’t a great design to begin with and an even worse design for the refrigerant used in the USA compared to the refrigerant they were designed for in Korea. (As I understand it)
As I posted a little lower down:
If the company has ever made a TV or a cell phone I’m not buying their appliance.
Samsung burned me once….
LG is actually pretty highly regarded for their clothes washers and dryers.
Their refrigerators have been a mess. That makes it hard for me to trust their other appliances.
If the company has ever made a TV or a cell phone I’m not buying their appliance.
Samsung burned me once….
Just get a Speed Queen. Incredibly durable, easy to repair, and surprisingly quiet.
Is Asko stil good? Owned by Gorenje since 2010
It’s kind of crazy that like heating air is not perfectly mastered in every stove, heating and pumping water in every dishwasher and laundry machine etc. It’s very simple stuff after all.
How fuckin cheap du you have to be to make a non perfect machine 🤷🏻♀️?!
For stoves, the thing that breaks is the control board. Hot + electronics is bad.
An induction stove avoids most of that problem because the hot happens in the pot and not inside the stove.
But I agree, there’s not much reason a stove can’t last 50 years. In fact, my parents have a 50 year old resistive stove that still works.
Washers have the most to go wrong of things you listed.
My burner igniters aren’t electronic-control and they still failed in a less than decade old stove that was not heavily used at all (I live alone and use the stove, not even the specific burners that failed, maaaaaaaaybe monthly)
They just make their parts cheap overall. Induction isn’t enshittification-proof. If anything it’s more susceptible, being entirely electronic.
That said I’d trade my gas stove for induction if I could, even with enshittification.
Got links?
Anything made for commercial kitchens.
Also second hand lab equipment. I was tired of my kitchen scale breaking and having annoying features like auto off after like 60 seconds. Got an ohaus lab scale off eBay for like $50, handles 18lbs, has a configuration menu with tons of options and features like count mode, sequential weight summing, and lets you set auto off for up to 30 minutes or completely disable auto off. Takes regular AAs or plugs into an outlet. I love it and it’s built like a tank.
Man, having worked in a couple research labs in a previous life, there’s no way I’d use a used lab scale for food. Especially when $50 will actually get you a pretty decent scale that has not been potentially used for weighing everything from diseased mice to stool samples to unidentified precipitates from a failed chemical reaction.
Since you’re here to type this, it was probably not used for anything too nasty, but I do not endorse that as a way to save a few bucks!
Idk worrying about a lab leak type pathogen scenario through an ebay sale seems far fetched to me. I picked one that looked lightly used and clean and wiped it down with disinfectant when I got it. The chance of a pathogen surviving that long doesn’t sound like a realistic concern. Most things it plausibly would have been exposed to, save for like highly radioactive dust getting lodged in its crevices, is easily handled with basic sanitation and hand washing. And it’s not like I’m putting food on the surface anyways.
Only thing I would be scared of is ethidium bromide on your food, but that probably wouldn’t be measured on a kg scale.
Yeah I think if I was gonna start using used lab equipment, a new autoclave would be my first purchase.
Salmonella recall? Nah, I’ve got a kitchen autoclave, I’ll be fine
In general anything made for businesses. They might be fine with us having stuff that doesn’t work, but businesses still need things that work to produce things that don’t.
Speed queen is one for washers and dryers
Anything that’s sold in Canada? I’m in the market for a new washer after my last two died on the 2 year mark.
No warranty? If you bought with a credit card they usually have a warranty extension feature and will extend the manufacturer’s warranty for you.
The first one was 2 weeks outside of warranty, the second one we’re currently waiting on the manufacturer and their mechanic. It’s a whole thing but it’s looking like it might be a refund at this point since it’s taking so long for them to even come look at it.
The first one wasn’t repaired because the part was back-ordered and by the time we repaired it it wouldve ended up costing the same as a new one.
$1700 for a seven-year warranty. How much you want to bet it’s specifically engineered to last no more than eight years?
The water heater that came with my house I bought in '98 lasted 20 years. I replaced it with the best I could afford at the time, which had a seven-year warranty. It lasted just over seven years. I replaced that one a couple of months ago with the longest warranty one I could find, which is twelve years. I know I’ll be replacing it in twelve years.
And by the time you got rid of it it was criminally inefficient.
One thing to note is that planned obsolescence for machines is not something that is easy to do to the level that you’re describing it.
Even if they use substandard materials at specific junctures with an estimated wearout time limit, there’s always the chance that a manufacturing flaw can increase the time between breakdowns
I think a good follow-up plan would be something more like finding the parts that break down and then digitizing them and then contracting with a service like JLCPCB to manufacture those individual parts on demand.
You could probably start a fairly successful company on just that if you had the time and energy to get the whole process rolling.
A combination of a SLS 3D printer to make the parts out of metal, or, you know, really high-quality 3D printer to make them out of nylon or whatever plastic is necessary, and getting the appropriate springs and levers and bearings and everything to fill in the gaps, you probably could make a nice side business for yourself just custom making the parts that break down the most often for appliances.
Speed queen washing machine
If it’ll run in a Laundromat for 30 years… it’ll run in your home.
My cousin had a coin operated speed queen washer when I briefly lived with her. The laundromat was getting rid of it not due to functioning, but because it would cost too much to retrofit it to use credit or bills, when it was already quite old.
You could use coins to make it work, but the panel was missing and you’d just stick your hand in and flip the switch. Always felt like you’d electrocute yourself.
Sucker ran great and she was doing 2 loads a day minimum (clearly no understanding of birth control, but she got her tubes tied after the 6th kid came out, so…)
She got it for far less than the price of a new bare-bones machine, so that could be a great option for anyone who may want one!
Speed Queen for washer / dryer.
https://speedqueen.com/products/all-products/
Vzug. Sadly only 2 year warranty
Yeah I was gonna say you can do this today by looking for the company that only makes whatever it is you’re trying to buy and costs double what you expect to spend on it based on the competition.
If you want something that lasts, you generally need to pay for it.
(Though if you get the opportunity, ask someone who repairs the thing you’re trying to buy what the best brand is, they’re the people that know)
Yup, the whole, “They don’t make things the way they used to,” thing is part survivorship bias, and part people not understanding that appliances used to be very major purchases.
If you spent the equivalent of what they cost back then, you’ll get an appliance that lasts decades.
Adding to this: just call around to different repair shops for the product you’re shopping for and ask them. Not only might you get some great advice, but you’ll also get an idea of who to call when you do need their services. How they respond when they know you’re not spending any money is a pretty good indicator of their true customer service.