That's excellent anecdotal evidence. It's also bullshit.
If you say so. It's all the experience I have. Odd to me that all the people I know and all the places I've lived, it's always the same thing.
I think it's a very common thing to hear, but often we look at the past through rose-colored glasses.
When was the last time you called an appliance repair man?
Literally a couple times a year. And if you think that's bullshit, I'm happy to let you pick up the bills on them. Conversely, about 5 years ago I replaced a dishwasher for my grandmother. I'd never known anything other than that old dishwasher at her house, and I asked her when they bought it. Her being the type who kept records of everything, she went to her filing cabinet to check. It was over 40 years old. I used to have to take her to visit her friends, most of whom I've also known most of my life. I couldn't help but notice their appliances were really old. When I asked if they ever had problems they would tell me that some of them had, once, a long time ago but still years after purchase, and then when it was fixed they haven't had any more problems. Oh, and my grandma's washer and dryer are almost as old as I am. There's a belt in the dryer that's been replaced, that's all I know of. However, when my grandfather was around, he may well have made repairs I don't know about.
If you're calling appliance repairmen a couple times a year, I think it's possible that you're an outlier. Outside of the dryer that I've been into multiple times in the 8 1/2 years I've lived in this house, the only other issue that I've had is the oven--and that FAR predated moving into this house and it was very, very old. And that's in a house where we have 5 refigerators, some of which were also moved here from previous houses.
As it relates to cars, have we not seen a tremendous improvement in automobile reliability over the last several decades? When was the last time that you had to do a "tune up" like we did 30 years ago?
I don't know about "have to." I still do them, and I routinely maintain the crap out of my own vehicles, so I can't really say what would happen if I didn't check as much as I check, and stay on top of changing the fluids and whatever other little routine maintenances I can think to do. What I can tell you is that the last car I had was a good car. Truly. I ran it for a long time. Eventually, I started having to replace every little thing on it until virtually nothing of the original engine remained. My grandpa's old Ford truck from the 50's on the other hand? My uncle still has it, and that thing is running with, as far as I know, nobody really doing much to it. Belts have had to be replaced, of course.
That old Ford truck from the 50s also might be burning/leaking oil, probably gets horrible gas mileage, doesn't comply with any modern exhaust regulations, the engine is probably unnecessarily heavy and underpowered compared to its displacement...
Back in those days, stuff didn't just "last forever" and the stuff that did required constant maintenance to be able to last forever.
This seems valid. Anecdotally, men used to know more about how to take care of their stuff, and they did so.
Yeah, and I'd argue that one of the reasons that men knew how to do that stuff was partly because they had to do that stuff regularly. It was worth it to learn how to do those things yourself because paying someone else do it as often as was necessary got pretty expensive...
And the engineers are dealing with a lot of additional constraints. Now you won't buy a washer/dryer that doesn't have 17 distinct cycle modes for whatever you want, when your mom was dealing with a washer/dryer that had "on or off". Now we're dealing with cars that have extensive computer controls so they make 300+ hp while actually making more than 8 mpg, so things have gotten increasingly more complex. And yet we STILL see improvements in reliability.
My current car has done pretty well, so anecdotally, I'd agree on that front. I've kept it up, but it hasn't fallen apart like my last one. Although, I'm pretty sure the clutch is going to go out any day now, but I don't count that, because that's gonna happen to every car sooner or later.
When I was in my teens, the idea of keeping a car past 100K miles was almost lunacy. You just knew massive things would be going wrong with it by then. I don't really think we see this with modern vehicles.
There's an issue in our modern world where people are buying disposable trash from the lowest cost country manufacturer because they can just look at the internet and buy based purely on cost. That's where "planned obsolescence" makes sense--you don't care if what you sell is trash because you just want the sale. But that situation diminishes the farther you go up the price ladder, to the point where buying appliances or vehicles, people actually care a little bit about quality/reliability.
Our washer, dryer, refrigerator, microwave, and dishwashers aren't cheap. They're actually quite high-end. Again, I'm happy to forward you my repair bills and the new purchases I've had to make when they crapped out to the point it wasn't worth another repair to me. The service industry for appliance repair is thriving in my city, if you want to argue that, ok. It should be drying up and becoming a thing of the past if you're correct. BUT, I grant you, everything I say is anecdotal, and I have no engineering expertise. But you can hardly blame me for having the opinion I have, if you'd dropped as much $ on appliance repairs as I have. We haven't even gotten into computers and phones.
Not discounting your experience, but I can't say that I've heard it echoed much from friends here locally.
