Genius idea, first you need to destroy capitalism to make it work
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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This model will never work. How do you keep selling garbage to continuously make money if your products aren't garbage?
All is good except the part, where products work for 15+ years: once enough people have bought your products your profits will drop.
Yeah, appliances are a really tough place to not just make money but stay afloat. What happens when you've saturated the market with good products that won't need to be replaced for a long time? You'd end up having to charge an arm and a leg for them because you simply can't sell enough to operate. You'd still get orders of course, but at a trickle.
Idk how to fix the problem either. Part of me says government subsidies for companies with proven manufacturing records, affordable prices, and customer satisfaction? Like an incentive to not enshittify and allow those companies to stay in business? Otherwise the consumer shoulders the cost, which defeats a lot of the purpose. The point is to improve lives, and being prohibitively expensive won't work. But convincing any government to spend money like that for such intangible and long-term societal benefits instead of pure profit seems like an unrealistic proposition. Like, how do you sell peace of mind to people who already arent suffering and with no concept of true insecurity?
I've been wanting companies like the one described for a very long time, but fuck me does it seem unlikely and hard to pull off
How about: accept that we are, like as a society, able to just not work as much? We are able supply people with a reasonable level of comfort without everyone slaving away this many hours every day. Let's just build what we need at minimum labour hours over the lifetime of the products and not worry about the products making a profit for anyone. The profit of not having to work but being able to pursue interests would be so worth it.
Charge up front for appliance disposal if they aren't independently rated for a certain amount of lifetime so you force people to pay what the actual cost is.
I recall they do this for something, forget what. I think it was like nuclear reactors to make sure you have money set aside to decommission it safely even if you go bankrupt.
Agree. I also want such manufacturers to exist, but life shows that anyone who tried such schemes either failed or reconfigured to a standard profit scheme. I have only seen mass produced items designed for long term usage in totalitarian countries like USSR.
And put real tech specs on the labels. Like the pulse width modulation for induction stoves and the water and energy used for different laundry/dishwasher cycles and the mean failure time for the fridge compressor.
None of this “innovative leak-resistant glass shelves” crap.
And a diagram with the actual object dimensions, with measurements all around. I'm shopping for a bed and there's so much bullshit using the height of the headboard instead of where the mattress actually sits
Holy shit yes.
I had a house with very narrow basement stairs and needed a dryer. So I very diligently checked that the dryer I ordered would fit.
Turns out there was a 3” bulge on the back they neglected to measure. Since it took them six fucking hours to find my damn house I disassembled it, carried it downstairs in parts, and reassembled it in the basement.
Whoever tries to get that thing out will think I’m a magician.
Oh, and a full wiring diagram.
Top-freezer refrigerators are the most efficient and the vast majority of them don’t have any smart features. Also, they’re among the cheapest refrigerators you can buy. Costco sells four of them and they’re all under $800. Most top-load washers don’t have any smart features and should last 15 years without repair. This seems like a problem where solutions already exist, it’s just that people shun them for being the cheapest option available.
Having the freezer on top is just bad design though. People use the refrigerator way way more than the freezer, so having it on the bottom means you always have to crouch down to get anything into or out of the fridge.
Bottom-freezer refrigerators use about 100 kWh more per year than top-freezer refrigerators. That's an 11,300 GWh difference if it were applied to the ~133 million households in the US. If that electricity were being provided by natural gas power plants, they would emit 13,273,400,000 pounds of CO2 to generate that electricity. The environmental cost of that added convenience is enormous.
I don't think that is that enourmous. It's more splitting hairs. For example, we can ballpark keeping a home 1°C warmer or cooler year round to be about 500kWh per year, conservatively. That is 5x as much carbon saved at the cost of a difference in comfort that most people wouldn't notice at all.
Should people care about these savings versus the convenience of freezer position? Sure. But we can't count on individuals to really consistently give any shits about the climate. And banning freezer-on-the-bottom fridges would be... a touch politically unpopular.
A far better solution than criticizing people's fridge layout choices is just levying a carbon tax, since then any given person can decide if they want their carbon budget to go towards fridge orientation or heating and cooling or something else entirely. And better than that - there would be an economic incentive to stop buying electricity from the gas plant.
Put your fridge on top of a box
Then I have to stand on top of a box to get into the freezer! Won't someone think of the convenience!?
Fine fine. Turn the fridge upside down! All the efficiency, and all the convenience! I'm brilliant!
Jeanyus! You deserve a raise.
"All people are tall" ok buddy
All people are tall, except for the ones who aren't.
Yes please