I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that’s a step to the right direction. Still I’m left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it’s often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
I’d guess the repair option would look better if you had the same economic status as the person who initially put it together.
Part of the answer here is also integrated design. To be able to be repaired a thing has to be designed for that, and to have identifiable parts that can be adjusted or replaced in isolation, and non-destructive disassembly.
If you have to destroy one part to adjust another, it’s not really repairable. If several functions/components are all one thing then you can’t really replace just the one.
To use a bike as an example, you can exchange wires, brake pads, seats and most other things in isolation, especially the things that are expected to wear out and need replacement. But you’re not going to replace part of your bar tape or frame, because they’re essentially one whole thing.
(Ok, you could probably weld a steel frame if you really wanted to, but I think the intent is readable.)
cries in Brexit
Needs a Brepaireentry.
A few reasons.
First, ease of repair isn’t a major reason for people to buy certain products. Because consumers don’t purchase on ease of repair for a lot of products, it doesn’t get prioritized in design. The cost of screws over glue may not be worth it if only a small part of the customer base wants screws.
Second, an OEM supply chain is a cost that a lot of people don’t want to pay. It may be cheaper to replace or refund a product than create a supply chain to fix items.
TIL Lemmy feels strongly about the right to repair and modern manufacturing practices.
Okay, I already knew. It’s on brand for whatever it is we are.
I once repaired my dishwasher. It cost me about £50 for a new pump, and many hours working out how to take the dishwasher apart and put it back together again. If I treated this as work, I would have been better off buying a new dishwasher, because I would have been paid more for those hours than the cost of a new dishwasher minus a pump.
Appliances are cheap relative to wages now, and repair still takes a lot of time. That’s the simple answer.
We have to consider why we want to encourage repair: it’s not simply true that we should always prefer to repair for its own sake. We should true to minimise greenhouse gas emissions or the use of resources that can’t be reclaimed, but not to the exclusion of all else.
If we had a carbon tax for example, it would somewhat increase the price of new goods and promote repair. But such a tax would not cause people to repair everything reparable - there would still be reparable items that are not economical to repair. This is a good thing though - if the carbon tax correctly embodies the externalities of producing emissions, then the choice to not repair it is a choice to do something else with people’s time. That time could be used on other productive things - maybe working to replace dirty fossil fuel infrastructure, or working to feed or entertain people, which are all things we want.
If we go the replace route. We should be looking at more refurbished equipment. Instead of an appliance going to a junkyard, a company/service would replace with a returned unit. Then take your broken one, fix/refurb that one and keep the cycle going.
But that takes labor, parts, storage, shipping, etc.
Let’s not forget the quality of the repair work. A lot of people may repair something but do it so poorly that they will have to deal with it again soon or it is unsightly. Repairing things is a skill, and when starting out people will fail or do a poor job.
I do all the repairs at my house. It takes a certain mechanical inclination for some things that many people don’t have.
Even if repair was encouraged it would take time to change how people think. As someone who does repairs I do notice how often people just ask for replacements instead even if it’s just a small easy thing to switch out. I tell them no, I fix it. That said, the things is repair is often fast and done in less than an hour if I have parts already.
Exploitation.
People in rich countries have stuff manufactured in countries with a lower living standard, less regulation, nor work safety, no unions, lower wages etc. Same goes for the raw materials all stuff is built out of. If you don’t have to care about anything, you can make everything so much cheaper. As long as this exploitative relationship between rich and poor countries exists, the rich will have access to cheap stuff that doesn’t need to be fixed.
Repairing broken appliances and electronics has different dynamic though. You’re paying a trained professional in a rich country to work for you. That doesn’t come cheap. Even though the parts may be cheap, labor costs a lot. That’s the exact reason why everything is manufactured in poor countries where labor is cheap. See also: planned obsolescence
We’ve been doing this for centuries already. It’s a tradition by now. Global inequality fueled the Dutch East India company, Made England rich etc. Oh, and American cotton plantations too. We’re just getting started with this can of worms.
I repair industrial machinery where it is worth it.
Phonecall and description of the problem: 15 minutes.
Guessing what parts may be broken and seeing if we have them in stock. Loading them into the car with my tools: 30 minutes.
Driving there, costs about 3€ per 10km where I live. Plus my time.
Disassembling and diagnose: minimum 15 minutes.
Replacing the part: best case 15 minutes.
Reassembly and test: best case 15 minutes.
Clean up the mess I made and get all my stuff can in the car: 15 minutes.
Drive back.
Fill in the time card, list replacement parts on invoice and send it: 15 minutes.
You’re looking at two hours plus driving for a job where everything goes right, and then spare parts on top of that.
If you’re doing it yourself you have to add an hour of watching YouTube on how to do it. Ordering the spare part, paying shipping which probably costs as much as the part itself. The job itself probably takes twice as long because it’s the first time you do it. You had to buy a special tool too because you did not have a torque wrench for T20. You maybe ordered the wrong part and have to get another.
At the end of the process you have a thing with all parts but one worn from a few years of use. Who knows what is next to break.
Or you could buy a new one for $500 and not have to worry for a year or two while it’s under warranty.
Not in the least bit true with phones, cars and computers. TVs have gotten extremely cheap compared to what they were when I was coming up, but I’d still take a healthy 1080p panel from 2015 over a born-to-fail $300 4k piece of trash made yesterday.
Basically, quality. We dipped quality into the gutter for quicker turnarounds and cheaper sales. Everything made today is basically shit.
It only became cheaper to buy new over repairing the old because companies stopped producing replacement parts, and making things repairable.
If they never enshittified things to be unrepariable, repairing things would still be cheaper than buying a new one.
Encouraging people to repair things isn’t going to help much when a fuckton of things simply are not made in a way that they can even be repaired at home or even by the people who made the thing.
This is the cornerstone of a consumer economy. Planned obsolescence is also part of it, with the “next generation” of whatever becoming the “must have” thing. Consider the styling changes to cars, especially the tail fin wars of the 1950s, or the cell phone market today. My Pixel Pro 6 running Graphene OS completely fills my needs, though it’s 3 generations old.
This is why governments run by the people need to control corporations.
It’s more about industrialisation making new products really cheap. Think about a pair of trousers. They’re exactly as repairable as trousers ever were, and you can still get your trousers repaired economically. But the cost of a minor repair will total about half the price of a cheap pair of trousers. So there is little point repairing trousers unless they’re expensive - you may as well buy a new pair if they’re cheap.
This isn’t because of planned obsolescence, this is because clothing used to be far, far more expensive - you can come up with various multipliers but somewhere between 10x and 100x as expensive in terms of how many days of work was needed to pay for them. This is because industrialisation means that cloth and clothes can be made with a fraction of the labour as it did centuries ago.
Sewing machines have also made repairs much more efficient, but to a far lesser degree - someone doing clothing repairs has overheads beyond the limited bit of work that is sewing up a split seam or rip, which are almost non-existent for the business producing clothes in the first place.
So, if this is the case for simple items like clothes where repair itself is more economical nowadays, how much more true is it for complex items where each repair job is completely custom?
I have to wonder how much a needle and thread is where you are that buying a new pair of pants is cheaper than patching a hole/tear in the ones you already have. Clothing is one of the few things that doesn’t have this problem… But it also has an oversaturation problem so I could see pants being basically free in some parts of the world.
Tax the fuck out of products that aren’t repairable but should be.
Most is economics of scale and mass production; repair is device & damage specific, which does not scale at all. Add exploitation of workers, just in time deliveries eliminating storage costs, the fact that transporting parts for 100 devices takes much more transport volume than 100 devices themselves…
a standout product is the steam deck: every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap. I don’t know how valve did it, but that should be the standard the industry should be aiming at.
Still, even for the Steam Deck as an example, which is probably the absolute closest we can get to the ideal case of the economy of repair, I’ve been hoping to buy every single individual part of the Steam Deck and assemble it into a complete Steam Deck myself for the fun and adventure of doing it myself (as someone who already had experiences repairing laptops), but everywhere I’ve looked it’s always more expensive to buy all individual parts of a Steam Deck, than buying one preassembled and officially sold. And this is not even counting the work hour it will take me to finish the process of building it.
But then again, there’s also the chicken and egg question involved in how exactly we got into a situation like this in our society these days.
Yeah, there we get into the part where logistics for a lot of spare parts are simply more expensive than for a finished product. You need more storage space, you need more workers for that storage space, you need to keep track of a large amount of inventory, and you cant fully standardize packaging since different parts have different needs when shipped. If you want to make a buck out of that extra work too, we have the situation that the sum of the parts costs less than the parts themselves.
Mass production and volume discounting. A circuit board can have hundreds of resistors on it. If yours has one resistor go bad you can buy a new one and replace it. But do you think it’s reasonable for you to get that one resistor for the same unit price as the company that orders a hundred million resistors a month?
For one thing, your one resistor takes about the same amount of labour and shipping costs as a tape reel of 10 thousand resistors (about the size of a dinner plate). So you’re already paying 10 thousand times the unit price on shipping and handling for that one resistor! For a manufacturer it’s not even worth their time to sell you 1 resistor. So you end up going through potentially multiple intermediaries before you can buy just 1. Each level of middlemen adds to the cost for you.
every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap.
That’s part of the problem isn’t it tho? When products aren’t designed to be serviceable, let alone to be serviceable by someone not specialized, and spare parts aren’t easily available (not even at 3rd parties), your only option quickly becomes to just buy a new one.
A few years back I replaced the screen on my Xiaomi Mi5. Parts were okayish to order, and while I did succeed, I wouldn’t have called it doable by someone who’s not afraid to turn their phone into a glorified paperweight. And that’s only gotten worse since then.
It’s in large part a problem of scale. Manufacturers buy parts in quantities so large that their per part cost is relatively tiny. Doubly so for Chinese manufacturers, because of currency conversion. If you as an individual want to buy one or two parts for a repair, it’s not profitable for companies to sell you those small quantities unless they charge what is sometimes exponentially more.
Purpose-built automation increases the manufacturing capacity, making the scale even larger than it used to be. It also means the control circuitry can be made very compact and highly integrated. So there’s individual components failing are harder to identify and replace, and they can handle multiple functions so the device is notably more broken than and older device might have been when a component fails.
Buy a TV and crack the LCD, the new LCD will cost 90% of the price, and then you need to throw in labor. Let’s say $100. That’ll cover an hour of their time and the shops time because they first have to verify the model, talk to a vendor, get it shipped, then install it and deal with the drop off holding contacting you for pick up and payment processing. After paying the workers, maybe they made $50 off that repair if they are always busy. If a part is DOA, more costs. Total it all up and realize you spent $550 to repair a TV that is on sale with a 1 year warranty for $499 at Walmart with no waiting.
Assembly lines make things cheap, especially if the labor is cheap
Yep. Add to that, they give things short lifespans these days - for instance with cars, many of the cuffs and pumps and moving parts are now plastic because they assume car = 10 years. So the internal quality has gone downhill, it’s cheaper than ever to manufacture new, but taking a 10 year old car and replacing every plastic part with another plastic part that will also fail would cost a small fortune… just buy a new car. They very much assume you’ll be landfilling and rebuying in no time. Reparability went away when we became a disposable society.
Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old
This may be true in single instances, but long-term it is often cheaper to repair a single device than repeatedly buy new replacements.
Does your assessment assume that you cannot fix it yourself?
Fixing things is nearly always cheaper than buying new unless the base assumption is you cannot perform it yourself and have to rely on a third party.
Repair services are often not even available because the margins would be so low. So, to answer your question of how we got here is because of Capitalism.
Fixing things is nearly always cheaper than buying new
This really depends on what you’re fixing. My laptop has a crap battery. To buy a new one is a few hundred quid. Plus various proprietary/niche screw bits. Plus the time to actually do it.
An equivalent new laptop is fractionally more expensive, and I can have it delivered to my home, freeing up the time element.
Tomfix my bicycle? I might need some internal components for my brifters; cheap AF and I know what I’m doing (and where to buy from). New shifters several orders of magnitude more expensive.
Not sure where you’re finding this battery price but I’m guessing it’s much cheaper than that.
I repair just about anything. Sometimes just for the challenge. Electronics are much easier than most realize.
The one thing that causes a barrier for most is the proper tools. “Proprietary” screws are a small toolkit away from just being a regular screw…
You could give the make and model of your laptop and I could send you links to buy anything and everything you need. I’d be willing to bet that tools and parts would be substantially less than buying a new laptop.
Caveat being if it’s a budget bin low spec laptop from a non reputable brand. If it was extremely cheap and cheaply made brand new, I’ll concede your point. Will say it’s still cheaper to fix, but at a certain point it doesn’t make sense to fix something that’s borderline unusable even new (outdated). That is assuming you don’t want to install Linux lol.
