[Gigachad]

As usual its just how much money you put in to it. We spend a lot of money making sure building foundations and silicon manufacturing works because failing is expensive and dangerous. I don't want to pay double/triple price for a toaster to slightly reduce its risk of failing because I'm happy to accept that on average it lasts a long time but there is some chance it fails sooner. If I'm in charge of buying a $100M building, you bet I want to pay extra to assure it will not fall over.

[massysett]

There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. I just came from a supermarket. It’s filled with items from around the world, of which most are very inexpensive. The consistent quality of these products is astounding—a bag of potato chips or a box of crackers tastes exactly the same, anywhere in the country where I buy it, year-round. A can of Coca-Cola tastes exactly the same even though they’re bottled in different facilities with different owners.

These things did cost a lot to develop, but for the consumer it’s quite inexpensive. As GP said, we just take these things for granted and don’t notice them.

[jules]

The coke bottles themselves are amazing too. I used to go to school with a reusable bottle filled with milk. Those cylindrical lunch bottles for kids were absolutely horrible. They leaked half the time, spoiling my bag and notebook. If you dropped them they would break because they were hard plastic. The rubber ring that was supposed to stop it from leaking would degrade quickly and start to smell funny. Those things cost as much as 20 bottles of coke, and an empty coke bottle is a vastly superior product in almost every way!

[samgtx]

A bit of a woo-woo aside but I've been trying to practice more gratitude thinking in my daily life and the grocery store is an easy place to be reminded of how good we have it.

[AnonC]

> A bit of woo woo aside but I’ve been trying to practice more gratitude…

No woo woo necessary. You may be interested in checking this (and related citations) about research on gratitude and psychological well being:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_interv...

[JohnBooty]

Practicing gratitude is probably the single easiest way to increase one's happiness, and yet it's so easy to forget to do it even if you know that. At least for me.

One thing we can do is keep a gratitude journal where we write down things we're grateful for. Can literally be grateful for the sun shining, or not experiencing an earthquake, for having the ability to write in a journal in the first place, etc.

It's so, so powerful.

[Aunche]

Relevant video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BNpk_OGEGlA

Grocery stores are a marvel for sure. It's a miracle that we can get a season fruit like grapes 365 days a year.

[mint2]

It may be a miracle of logistics when ignoring negative externalities like carbon cost vs not shipping it halfway across the globe. Why can’t we eat seasonally? It usually tastes better and makes things less monotonous

[Psyladine]

I'm a believer that the largest part of what led Yeltsin to fundamentally change what it was, and thus cause the dissolution of the USSR, was his impromptu grocery store visit in the US.

[hodgesrm]

Conversely there are lot of things that are expensive and work very badly. "Designer anything" as for example, designer light fixtures. I've had terrible experiences with these.

[fendy3002]

It happens to almost anything creative products, stylish, custom made, and services.

I guess because there isn't enough time and money to assess the quality and optimize them.

[CRConrad]

I think it's more that you just simply can get away with it: Artsy-fartsy types that care more about design care less about function and quality, so don't question and check them enough for manufacturers to have to keep high standards in those areas.

[WWLink]

> There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap.

Even light switches are pretty cheap. You can get a basic single light switch for around $2. Sure there's decora switches, dimmer switches, and all kinds of other great things for $50+ but the basic $2 ones will still last decades.

[NavinF]

If you replaced the contacts with a triac and replaced the switch mechanism with a thick bistable flexure, it would likely last centuries and have a BoM cost around $2.

I’ve had 2 switches fail over the last 2 years out of the ~40 switches installed in the house. One failed by welding itself closed and another failed by caving into the electrical box when I hit it too hard. Even though the 40 year life expectancy of a single switch sounds good, the reality is that one fails catastrophically every year. I’d love to get more reliable switches that last well over a century, but I’m not aware of anyone that measures this sort of thing.

[fendy3002]

Exactly. I can't imagine how expensive a computer chip should be if the process isn't optimized / streamlined.

And for kitchenware and dinningware, we still get decent quality for a still rather cheap price. Of course as the article stated it's not easy to determine which one with decent quality, however if customers only aim for the cheapest one of course it won't be good.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Coke and potato chips are not at all inexpensive if you include the health costs.

They're pretty good examples of things that are cheap and don't work very well, if your goal is health and not distraction/entertainment.

[CRConrad]

But health isn't the goal when people consume Coke and potato chips, and conversely if health is your goal you don't consume Coke and potato chips.

[et-al]

I beg to differ, many of these large household companies are shells of their former selves as they've been bought, bankrupted, and traded around. What's left is just a name with no solid product line backing it anymore. E.g. Sunbeam was a solid household appliance name, and now it's a crap. Same with Braun.

The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amazon is full of this. Oddly, the thing I end up trusting these days are in-house brands because the store has some responsibility to make sure their own brand's reputation doesn't get too tarnished.

[ncmncm]

I don't even know how I would identify a good toaster to buy, nowadays. Electric kettles are a problem, too.

[bgentry]

After purchasing the top two Wirecutter picks for electric kettles (Cuisinart and some gooseneck kettle) both died within a year. The gooseneck one was rusted on arrival, clearly awful build quality.

I decided to try paying much more for a Fellow Stagg EKG, and it was a great decision. It’s lasted over 3 years and has been an absolute joy to use compared to the prior mass market garbage.

I often wish for a Wirecutter-like site that prioritizes quality and especially longevity above all else. Wirecutter always focused too much on cost, and even their “upgrade picks” tend to suffer awful quality issues. For years their top blender pick was an Oster that had hundreds of angry reviews about dying within months. Wirecutter ignored the feedback for years despite so many people streaming into their own comments section to vent about it.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Honestly, I had spent 20 years in the US and we consistently bought the cheapest appliances ever.

When I bought my house I finally said "screw it, let's see what decent appliances look like".

Japanese rice cooker set me back $95 and I thought I would never hear the end of it, and after 4 years, it had already paid itself off (we were doing $14 rice cookers every 6 months). Air fryer was $70 but the previous $40 only lasted 13 months. Basic coffee maker was like $60 but made non-burnt coffee. A little combo oven/toaster is what I ended up on since we had one in the last apartment since we never used a full oven.

The ones that are honestly pretty difficult to find were dishwasher but one of our friends suggested bosch because we wanted a quiet appliance.

[JohnBooty]

There's also just a... man, I don't know how to describe it. Kind of a mental benefit to using slightly nicer things.

When I was young, almost everything I owned was the cheapest possible version of that thing. Everything just kind of sucked, brutally cost-optimized to the point of being somewhat nasty to use and barely functional.

I was still very fortunate: I had food to eat, clothes, etc. A lot of kids in the world would have traded places with me.

Now that I'm older, I have no interest in "luxury" goods, but there's that subtle intangible benefit to using e.g. the $95 rice cooker vs. the $14 rice cooker. You feel like somebody who's worth more than the cheapest possible piece of disposable shit, I guess. Or at least I do.

It makes better rice, too, of course. And there's the ecological benefit of not tossing a $14 rice cooker into the landfill every couple of months. But there's also a bit of self worth involved, or something.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

I'm not a super stingy guy and we're a Cuban family so rice is an every day dish.

It's not super fancy or anything but it fills that rice craving and is a multi-use device.

[ncmncm]

In the US, the $95 cooker lasts no longer, and works no better, than the $25 unit. (There is no $14 one.) You might be able to do better with a Japanese brand, but it is vanishingly unlikely you will get the same one as they would have sold in Japan, unless you actually get it shipped from there.

I make rice in a saucepan on the range top. I have to come back and turn it off when it's done. Otherwise, it is the same. If you care about how good your rice is, you are starting with short-grain rice. Or red, or black, or arborio for risotto.

[ebruchez]

> one of our friends suggested bosch because we wanted a quiet appliance

We've been very happy with our Bosch. Don't ever buy a cheap dishwasher.

[ncmncm]

You can spend as much as you like on a dishwasher. $200, $300, $400, $500, $700, $900, $1200.

The only real difference above $400 is how loud it is. In a silent room you can't tell whether the $1200 dishwasher is running at all.

That does not matter to everybody.

[sn9]

For kitchen stuff, America's Test Kitchen has amazing equipment reviews.

In addition to their testing process itself, they actually dogfood their advice by using their own picks in their test kitchen so they get used by tons of people way more often than any testing process could accomplish so they can get a real sense of how good a recommendation holds up over time.

[Ekaros]

Last Yule I bought a toaster for my brother. All of them felt kinda like crap, flimsy cheap, scratchy action... I was not even looking at cheapest but something I imagine to be reasonably mid-range that is around 50€ mark. After all it is a moving platform, some heating elements and case. Not at all complicated.

[jfk13]

It's been mentioned on HN before, but in case you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y.

[ncmncm]

At issue is whether spending more gets you a better toaster, or just the same toaster but for more money. It is hard to find out.

[pmyteh]

Commercial toasters (and, I imagine, commercial electric kettles) are 'good' in the sense of being well-built and long-lasting. I've got a 1980s Dualit toaster which is essentially bomb-proof (the clockwork timer will eventually stop working but is easily replaced; even the elements can be readily changed out if they get damaged).

Of course, the downside is that new ones start at £150 or so. So it's difficult to make a financial case (as opposed to an aesthetic, or a principled one) over a £10 special from Tesco.

[kasey_junk]

The problem with ‘commercial’ kitchen equipment is that most of it is just up branded domestic equipment.

When you do buy ‘commercial’ kitchen equipment you’ll notice lots of things that are just downright worse. Energy efficiency, safety features, and noise reduction are all things that are _way_ worse than with their domestic counterparts.

[michaelt]

"Real" commercial kitchen equipment is often totally different.

Commercial fridges will stay cool even if their door is opened 20 times an hour. Commercial glass washers take a tenth of the time a home dishwasher takes. And if they're noisy, ugly and they need to be cleaned every day without fail, that's just normal commercial equipment.

[chronogram]

I bought a store brand 9A kettle and it's fine [1]. They're simple products and shouldn't break unless you have very hard water, in which case a round of vinegar should clean that. What are you running into?

1: https://www.blokker.nl/blokker-waterkoker-bl-10202---rvs---1...

[ncmncm]

In the US, kettles are carefully designed to last one year and no more. Same for a $20 or $100 unit.

I have not discovered a way to find one that is not so designed. Regular reviews are useless.

[NickNameNick]

I imagine that makes the slow Denise of Sears/Craftsman particularly unfortunate then.

[ncmncm]

What?

[JoachimSchipper]

Your parent comment has an autocorrect error, and meant to write demise (death).