The electrical goods that you can buy off the shelf in mainstream stores are rubbish. They are designed to last about 12 months and then they die. If you are lucky the repair cost is about one third of the cost of the appliance so you can get it repaired, if it is half the cost then throw it away and buy another.
And that’s the point. Appliances are disposable, to be thrown away and thought nothing about. This is wrong on so many levels. Our resources are not infinite, building these appliances takes chemicals and process that are good for no-one. The corporations that made low quality goods have been buying out those that made high quality goods but made less money. Creda buying Hoover, for example. So everything is going low quality.
The breakages are somehow never covered under warranty either…
So in the last 18 months we have had the following appliances break:
- Widescreen TV, too expensive to repair so it is now junked. Had to buy another, cheaper, TV.
- Dishwasher, twice, we got a repair guy in once, fixed it myself the second time.
- Car, twice, my wife’s cheap Daewoo just keeps on breaking.
- Dryer, it’s new and the bearings are already shot on it. Currently out for repair.
- 512MB memory chip, caused continual rebooting, makers refused to accept the chip despite the lifetime warranty.
- AMD CPU, oh wait that was me, I recall crushing the thing. Oops.
The only answer is to buy cheap and disposable everything or take that leap and purchase the super expensive. Not the top end standard stuff, as the internals are the same as the cheap rubbish, but the alternative brands that last. Smeg fridges, or Apple Computers, for example.
Moral: Corporations are bad.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Keith // Dec 10, 2004 at 12:56 PM
Pleased, in an ironic kind of way, to hear that all of your stuff keeps breaking too. Since we moved to Dubai, every appliance we have bought seems to have a useful life of just a little more than the warranty. I had assumed that it was because the stuff we get (even though it’s marketed under ‘big-name’ brands) is mostly made in remote areas of Outer Mongolia, from components found lying around on the desert floor, and assembled by Munchkins from the Land of Oz. Also the environment here is crap for hi-tech stuff - there’s a lot of dust blowing about, and the ambient temperature can get pretty warm (approaching 50 deg C in the summer) if your air conditioning isn’t working.
2 Jackdaw // Dec 11, 2004 at 2:02 AM
That’s it though isn’t it, they are all made from the same stuff found on the desert floor, all the name brands consist of the same components.
No wonder the shuttle keeps blowing up; manufacturing quality is as rare as political integrity.
In Dubai for work?