Your toaster dies the second you unbox it. Pants rip on day one. The quality of everything is trash now. This is what bigheaded people call enshittification. Companies deliberately design products to break right after the warranty. This is due to the so-called “Hunt for Infinite growth.” Steady profits ain’t enough. They need MORE, so they skimp, shrink packages, and shove everything behind subscriptions. Infinite growth is a plague, and it hurts your personal finance.
Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.
You’re mostly right, but I think you have cause and effect backwards.
The real problem is advertisers training everyone to seek instant gratification and treat everything as disposable. People have been brainwashed to want things cheap, and to want them right now.
You can still get appliances that will last decades, but they’re more expensive. Back in the “good ol’ days”, home appliances were a major purchase that you usually budgeted and saved for. If it broke, you hired someone to repair it. When you bought a toaster, the price was the equivalent of $100 to $300 adjusted for inflation.
Not to mention that there’s heavy survivorship bias on the topic. There were garbage quality appliances made back then that didn’t survive.
And you could look for an appliance that is supposed to be quality, and costs even more than other “quality” brands. Then that thing you paid that much for lasts even shorter than the cheap appliance. And then when you take it to get repaired, because it cost so much of course it can be fixed, they tell you the entire [main active unit] needs replaced because the mfg doesn’t provide the [small bit of active unit that’s actually bad] which happens to cost only twice what the cheap appliance in whole costs.
I think not.
I remember the last time I went to the store to get a toaster.
They were all in the same price range and all about the same quality. There was no option for an expensive toaster that would last fifty years.
You were shopping at a store with cheap products then.
So name it.
What is this store that sells high durability consumer products?
An appliance store…
You’re going to have to give a detailed explanation of your process here.
What store did you imagine I went to?
Walmart.
In store try Williams Sonoma for higher quality.
This literally the first time in my life that I, an American, has heard someone call ‘William Sonoma’ a quality brand.