Appliance Buying Rant

Ischgl99 said:
I will state up front, I do not want the government trying to “protect” me in any way what so ever from companies ruining their reputation. The only protection I want is transparency, it is my job as a consumer to research what I buy and I only want it required that companies cannot hide negative information. If they did that, I think half the companies would be bankrupt in a month…

I have no problem with a company building $hitty products and letting the market sort things put, that is what a free market is supposed to do, but we are buying products based on a company’s past reputation, and that is where the problem comes in, we need to learn we can’t do that any longer. We bought our Whirlpool appliances based on their reputation, we won’t be making that mistake again. It takes years until enough of the market realizes company X is now crap, and many of us that have bought their products for years, pay the price. But, that company also spends years paying the price when they realize their dumb mistake and try to fix it.
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This is the legacy of what I call "Pump and Jump" management. A company is falling behind others in profitability, so they hire someone with a record of making companies more profitable. The new CEO cuts corners to save expenses, and that makes the products less reliable and/or perform worse that the prior ones. People buy the cheapened (not necessarily cheaper product and the reputation eventually goes down the tubes. By then, the CEO (and his highest-ranking henchmen) have jumped to a new job, with another sucker company that will show increased profitability for a while, before the reputation is ruined by the degraded product. Then it will take years, or decades to recover. Some never recover.

This is exactly what happened to Black & Decker. It got so bad, the professional tools had to be redesigned after the CEO left, but professional customers would no longer even look at a tool with the B&D name on it. The company had to make the tools a completely different color and dredge up the trademark of Dewalt (a company that they had bought out long before, and which had a reputation for well-designed and long-lived power tools) in order to get back into the market.
 
pontiac428 said:
Speaking on the depth of the bench, my Kenmore can beat the pants off of your Monkey Wards. Like, I'm loading the dryer before you're even starting spin. Your belts don't even smoke when the light comes on, man, all show and no go. Just 'cause mine's on cinder blocks don't mean it's slow. Told'ya that overbored pump outlet really rips. You gotta get away from that old two-bearing drum, man. That goes out of balance at the top of the load, you're gonna be on manual wash until pay day.

Oh yeah. This has legs.
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Yeah, I get it. You’re right. Pie in the sky and any group with more than one is now a cat herd. But I’ve seen so many machines that had insanely clever and robust parts bodged together with “what were they smoking?” parts. In the one company i worked with that I had access to engineering there were several engineers working on different parts of the same machine. And they all were not of the same caliber. I finally understood why things were that way.

Bonehead is right, Quality Assurance is not reassuring.
 
"Now they want you to pay for something you used to get for free" Tom Petty, The last DJ. Mike

pontiac428 said:
heard about the subscription scam recently, and my reaction has been pretty violent about the whole thing. Repossession of features from not paying on an ongoing basis is extortion. Thuggery. Abuse of the social contract.

The conglomerates are redefining ownership as continuous payment post purchase now. They did it, just like how they redefined durable goods as a 3-5 year good. They redefined lifetime warranty (oh, you mean the lifetime of the product?) years ago. They make these deals with the devil in smoke-filled rooms bubbling with greed. The shareholder comes first, profit must continually increase, the gap between rich and poor must be opened as wide as the feedstock can support. In the end there can be only one.
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C-Bag said:
Yeah, I get it. You’re right. Pie in the sky and any group with more than one is now a cat herd. But I’ve seen so many machines that had insanely clever and robust parts bodged together with “what were they smoking?” parts. In the one company i worked with that I had access to engineering there were several engineers working on different parts of the same machine. And they all were not of the same caliber. I finally understood why things were that way.

Bonehead is right, Quality Assurance is not reassuring.
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LOL, I'm right? Drink.
What I experienced at my last job was "design by committee". Building armored vehicles. In one building they were designing the cab's armor; another group off-site designed the doors. Nothing lined up. Nothing fit. The guys in assembly had been told to meet a deadline. Through a major effort (or threats) they got the "engineers" down on the shop floor. I thought there was going to be a fist fight. The purchasing department even got in on it. They had ordered metric bolts, the "committee" had specified U.S threads. The "committee" accused the assemblers of cross-threading the fasteners on what few holes looked like they lined up. Within a month they stuck the fork in and blew the contract.
Solution?
They closed the Cincinnati site and moved their operation to Texas. Layed off everyone...except the "committees". They took them to Texas with them.
American manufacturing drove me to retire after that.
 
Provincial said:
This is the legacy of what I call "Pump and Jump" management. A company is falling behind others in profitability, so they hire someone with a record of making companies more profitable. The new CEO cuts corners to save expenses, and that makes the products less reliable and/or perform worse that the prior ones. People buy the cheapened (not necessarily cheaper product and the reputation eventually goes down the tubes. By then, the CEO (and his highest-ranking henchmen) have jumped to a new job, with another sucker company that will show increased profitability for a while, before the reputation is ruined by the degraded product. Then it will take years, or decades to recover. Some never recover.

This is exactly what happened to Black & Decker. It got so bad, the professional tools had to be redesigned after the CEO left, but professional customers would no longer even look at a tool with the B&D name on it. The company had to make the tools a completely different color and dredge up the trademark of Dewalt (a company that they had bought out long before, and which had a reputation for well-designed and long-lived power tools) in order to get back into the market.
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Companies are a lot like kids, you can’t tell them anything, they have to make the same stupid mistakes everyone else does because “they know better”.

I’m one of those that has a B&D circular saw passed down to me from my dad from when they knew what they were doing, and my son will probably get it some day. Or more likely my daughter, she is more interested in building things than my son. Now, I would not even consider anything with the B&D brand on it. I do like my DeWalt tools though, they have worked well for me, but I haven’t bought anything in many years, so who knows, maybe the new ones are crap too. I heard the same thing happened to Porter Cable when they got bought out, but I haven’t needed to buy a new router in a couple decades.

You are completely correct, CEOs and other upper level executives have become consultants who are there for a limited time to meet certain financial metrics the corporate boards demand. They are the ones responsible for all of this since it is they that hire the CEOs and create the incentives that cause this. Most boards and upper level executives have no experience in the company, or even in the industry, so they don’t realize the damage caused until it is too late. I also wonder how many actually care, they got their money. Reminds me of all the stories of Chainsaw Al and how many companies he ruined over his career.

I worked for German companies for most of my career, they are not immune to the American business style, but the engineers still seemed to have say over the accountants. I recall on a trip to the factory the plant manager was talking about a new machine they installed that increased production on a particular product line and replaced a machine that was only two years old. I doubt that would happen in many places here in the States, the accountants would complain loudly that the machine still had significant value on their books and could not get replaced. Who cares if it’s better for the company, the balance sheet needs to look good this quarter!
 
As a young engineer in my formative years, the 70’s, at HP, the company really emphasized product reliability and testing. Packard used to say “build it, break it, fix it and repeat”. We had a real quality group with in-house stress testing, EMI, safety, etc. I spent a year thinking about predictive quality of hardware and firmware with Bayesian statistics, black and clear box testing, how to conduct a good design review, etc. In those days, products sold for 4X the manufacturing cost…as a result of the anticipated quality and performance.

That is of course all lost today…HP no longer exists in the same form, and no company that I have been associated with since has come anywhere close to awareness of product development…as CTO or VP engineering I had to start more or less from scratch to rebuild engineering groups who could perform. But it’s like changing a tire without stopping the car.

There was a time where it looked like Japan was going to figure this out…high quality, good performance, low price…but no. Too bad, really.

I remember having (I put the well known company name here, but thought better of it) as a customer for a product line of semiconductors I managed. Their concern was almost exclusively price. They would fly a big group out, spend an hour telling me how critical another 10 cents a part was, then want to get taken to dinner. These are the guys making, or really just “specifying“ the products being complained about above.

In fact, the US is losing the design ability to do anything about this…I believe if you don’t build the current generation of product, you can’t design the next generation, and this is where we are now in many areas, giving up design responsibility to Asia.

Wow, I sound like an old coot!
 
The current top line Motorola land mobile radio buy the bit structure.

Cheaper to build just one platform.

They are software controlled so it is a matter of telling it what to do.

As one wants to upgrade they can simply buy the bit to add the features.

Stock it is very powerful, the additional stuff are not common use things so pay only as needed.

Buy once though.

Sent from my SM-G781V using Tapatalk
 
Winegrower said:
As a young engineer in my formative years, the 70’s, at HP, the company really emphasized product reliability and testing. Packard used to say “build it, break it, fix it and repeat”. We had a real quality group with in-house stress testing, EMI, safety, etc. I spent a year thinking about predictive quality of hardware and firmware with Bayesian statistics, black and clear box testing, how to conduct a good design review, etc. In those days, products sold for 4X the manufacturing cost…as a result of the anticipated quality and performance.

That is of course all lost today…HP no longer exists in the same form, and no company that I have been associated with since has come anywhere close to awareness of product development…as CTO or VP engineering I had to start more or less from scratch to rebuild engineering groups who could perform. But it’s like changing a tire without stopping the car.

There was a time where it looked like Japan was going to figure this out…high quality, good performance, low price…but no. Too bad, really.

I remember having (I put the well known company name here, but thought better of it) as a customer for a product line of semiconductors I managed. Their concern was almost exclusively price. They would fly a big group out, spend an hour telling me how critical another 10 cents a part was, then want to get taken to dinner. These are the guys making, or really just “specifying“ the products being complained about above.

In fact, the US is losing the design ability to do anything about this…I believe if you don’t build the current generation of product, you can’t design the next generation, and this is where we are now in many areas, giving up design responsibility to Asia.

Wow, I sound like an old coot!
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It's a crying shame what they did to HP. I have a lot if their excellent old equipment. IMHO they are on a suicidal business trajectory. Their new power supply design released with design flaws (overshoot) that you would expect from a $50 ebay special, how did this possibly get released? The latest is no warranty for equipment not purchased for a business.
 
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