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.
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.