Is it just me, or do the things you buy today break down sooner than they did in the past? In other words, do things just not last very long anymore?
The “things” I’m talking about are the products that we use in our homes — washing machines and dryers, refrigerators and TVs, even our cars and the numerous electronic devices we own these days.
In an admittedly unscientific survey (that is, my own experiences and those of family and friends), there sure seems to be some confirmation of this. Case in point: washing machines.
In the case of my brother’s family, they’ve owned a washing machine, one of the top American brands in the industry, for more than seven years. Over that period, they’ve had a total of four service calls that they’ve had to schedule. Wisely, they opted for the five-year service plan at the time of purchase, which covered any parts and labor for repairs. And it’s a good thing they did, because the washing machine needed a number of repairs including a few PC board replacements, an internal hose that was leaking, and a water sensor. Turns out buying the warranty was a good investment that ended up saving them a lot of money. 
Their washing machine was neither the cheapest on the market, nor was it the top-of-the-line model, but somewhere in the middle and closer to the higher end offerings. The most expensive ones even had a WiFi connection, which they passed on.
I can’t help but contrast this with my 20+ year old washing machine, which in all that time has needed exactly one repair; a mechanical part that went bad (as mechanical parts do), and that was it. Mine is also an iconic American brand but on the lower end of the price scale. It also has exactly three knobs on the front panel and from what I can tell few, if any, electronic systems or parts.
Lest you think that this is just another instance of an old man ranting, younger people are taking notice too. For instance, Vox editor Izzie Ramirez spells out her findings about product quality in an article titled “Your stuff is actually worse now.” She does some digging to find out why a bra she bought recently degraded significantly after only a few washes, while one she’d owned previously had lasted for 10 years. She finds that the dip in quality is due largely to the use of lower quality materials in order to cut production costs. So as material and other costs have increased over the last decade, consumer expectation is to pay roughly the same that they paid in years past. But to keep that same price-point requires using lower-cost materials, which are usually lower quality than the original. Hence, a clear indicator as to why clothing does not last as long as it once did.
Some of this can be attributed to materials, but in other cases it may have to do with the design itself. That is, as product designs add more functions and features and correspondingly more electronic circuits and computers are added into the mix, the likelihood of some kind of failure goes up. With added complexity come more points of failure so that even a small bug becomes something that requires an expert to repair.
But all of this may also illustrate that old engineering truism that a product can be good, cheap, or fast, but you can only ever have two of the three. Which may just mean that manufacturers have sacrificed the “good” at the altar of the cheap and manufactured quickly.
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking, NEWS • PROFILES • EDITORIALS
