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Parent Post: The bad guy is YOU. Why we can't have nice things.
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saarnok
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4/13/2026, 3:23:30 AM
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Your experience has been the opposite???? What exactly do you mean by "old cheap toaster"? The original Toastmaster would cost something like $230 today. I use one of these every time I make a piece of toast. It's a hundred years old and still working fine. ROI: 36,000 pieces of toast. Seriously though, all the "real problems" you've accurately identified are results rather than causes. Consolidation only happens when a company sells to someone who incorporates it into their portfolio of investments. That can only happen if there's some force making independent companies relatively unprofitable. My point is it's not simple "corporate greed" at the causal level. If for instance, Carhart found it maximally profitable to retain their literally unshakable market share in producing the exact same products they'd been making for a century-ish, then they'd still be doing so. The actual fact is they needed to change or die. They changed. The absolute critical factor in that change was that their customers, bit by bit, chose a lower cost alternative to the products Carhart was making. If every time anyone walked into a farm store for a coat they chose Carhart and paid the price, which would be something like $300 by now, then Carhart coats would still be made the way they were in the 70's and 80's. Fact of the matter is that you, me and virtually everyone else chose to buy the lower cost brand often enough to override whatever resistance they had to changing their ways. And, here's how you can KNOW they made the right choice: No one replaced them with the coat equivalent to the one they used to make. It's simply unprofitable to do so. You want good ol' American made clothes? I'll direct you to them. But, you won't pay the price unless you're a lot more like me than most people. Until we address the underlying causes of the effects we like to believe are causes, we're not really going to get very far.
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sonatime
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4/14/2026, 3:50:01 AM
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When I mentioned “old cheap toasters,” I wasn’t thinking of the heavy-duty vintage Toastmaster models. I meant the basic, everyday toasters from the 80s and 90s that you could pick up for $15–25 and that often lasted 15–20+ years. I think part of the issue is that it’s hard for consumers to know how durable something will actually be when one buys it. Companies understand this too, and many now use cheaper components that tend to fail sooner through planned obsolescence. On the Carhartt example, I can imagine that consumer demand for lower prices pushed things in that direction. Perhaps a lot of people might not economically/comfortably afford the $300 plus price for the old school quality anymore, even if they’d prefer it. So the “cheaper option” often feels like the only realistic choice rather than a pure preference. I don’t think it’s purely “corporate greed,” but I also don’t imagine companies staying passive either. They probably actively design products, market them, and make decisions that favor volume and shorter lifespans. It is probably an ongoing feedback loop between consumer habits and corporate strategy. Plenty of good documentaries on planned obsolescence on YouTube now. I’d have to go back and see which ones I watched previously
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saarnok
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4/15/2026, 3:15:17 AM
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I definitely appreciate the perspective, but it lacks a certain depth. For instance: Why was Maytag's best quality washers and dryers attained roughly 1990 or so? Same for Whirlpool that eventually took them over. There's more than half a century of companies fairly reliably improving TCO for consumers with presumably just as greedy owners as we have now. Try to imagine that most of the major players in the US congress cared about this degradation. Can you imagine them not forming committees and issuing subpoenas to have corporate owners answer for this phenomenon? The answer is obviously "no", which indicates this degradation is more likely a feature rather than a bug. I don't really have a feel for how old you are, but are you aware that people are using washing machines over thirty years old that have never needed exorbitant repairs. Here's a matter to consider in the mix. When we had a boomer economy, companies didn't need to worry about future customers because there was a genuine growing population that would buy their goods. Family brand loyalty would be EXTREMELY important in that scenario. They built the best quality possible because it was advertising to the children of their previous customers. But, as fertility falls, another strategy needs to be employed. You don't need to sell to the kids of previous owners because there aren't any. Now, you need to sell to the same customer, over and over again. And, oddly enough, they've done pretty good at it.
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