Home appliances have improved on measures other than durability, though, such as energy efficiency. And cars are significantly more durable, lasting for roughly twice the mileage before requiring repairs that amount to rebuilding the car...
Home appliances have improved on measures other than durability
Older home appliances were also a lot more expensive in real terms (that is, controlling for inflation). Today, that same expense will generally buy you a “heavy-duty/professional use” version of the appliance that will be just as durable as the decades-old version was, and provide all of these other benefits for free. If anything, the real mystery is why these cheap, throwaway home appliances have gotten so popular all of a sudden. The general technological improvement you point to is actually a plausible candidate here—why buy an appliance that’s optimized for durability, when in five or ten years you’ll probably be shopping for a new model in order to get those other benefits?
Part of it is that the appliances are also literally cheaper. It looks like a full size fridge cost about $500 in the 60s, which works out to $3500 adjusted for inflation.
The example I was going to use was washers and dryers, which cost about $385 for the set in 1959, or about $3200 in current money.
I found a stash of business records from 1913, for a company that sold quality socks.
Adjusting to today’s money, a pair of these socks cost $70. But they were really nice socks, apparently. The kind you would mend with your darning kit.
My grandmother paid roughly $7 for it [a Westinghouse oscillating fan] in 1938, which was a lot for a blue-collar family to spend in the Depression, and which amounts to $117 in 2017 dollars.
Makes sense when I think about it. As Yvain documents, enough big-ticket items have become so much more expensive in the US that a bunch of other goods or services must’ve become much cheaper — otherwise the US inflation rate would always be massive.
I wonder how much of that is improvements in their manufacture (I suspect at least some) versus improvements in things like oils and other lubricants which then reduce the wear.
Home appliances have improved on measures other than durability, though, such as energy efficiency. And cars are significantly more durable, lasting for roughly twice the mileage before requiring repairs that amount to rebuilding the car...
Older home appliances were also a lot more expensive in real terms (that is, controlling for inflation). Today, that same expense will generally buy you a “heavy-duty/professional use” version of the appliance that will be just as durable as the decades-old version was, and provide all of these other benefits for free. If anything, the real mystery is why these cheap, throwaway home appliances have gotten so popular all of a sudden. The general technological improvement you point to is actually a plausible candidate here—why buy an appliance that’s optimized for durability, when in five or ten years you’ll probably be shopping for a new model in order to get those other benefits?
A point brought home to me by the MetaFilter discussion of the article linked in our OP:
Makes sense when I think about it. As Yvain documents, enough big-ticket items have become so much more expensive in the US that a bunch of other goods or services must’ve become much cheaper — otherwise the US inflation rate would always be massive.
I wonder how much of that is improvements in their manufacture (I suspect at least some) versus improvements in things like oils and other lubricants which then reduce the wear.
That is an important counter-weight to the claims in the article I linked to.
ETA: Though maybe it’s actually consistent in light of dogiv’s observation that there were always limits on how much you could overbuild cars.
Quite—I have a 10 year old car and haven’t had to do anything more drastic than change the battery—regular maintenance kinds of stuff.