[denton-scratch]

Electrolux are a horrible company. They seem to have borged a whole load of other brands, which all have now descended to Electrolux's abysmal standards.

- They don't support their own products; the warranty is served by a third-party

- Their products are built to a price-point, and fail just after the warranty is up

- Spare parts are expensive

- They apparently have neither an email address or phone number

The water heater in my AEG dishwasher failed three times in six months. Each time I had to wait a month for the repair man to arrive, declare that my water-heater had failed, and come back two weeks later to fit the part.

I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.

[wpietri]

> I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.

I think the short answer is that companies spend many hundreds of billions each year manipulating the market. Instead of going to all the hard work of building a trusted brand, you can just buy one people have a vague familiarity with, spend a bunch on marketing, and ship cheap garbage until the brand value has been reduced to zero.

[denton-scratch]

Yes, I get that.

But why are they making machines out of parts they know are defective? Why are they not incentivised to fix the design? For example, a washing-machine electronic control panel with a defective circuit design, which meant that a certain diode was overloaded, and would reliably burn out a short while out of warranty.

Electronic control panels for white goods are incredibly expensive. Come to that, if you started from scratch to build (e.g.) a washing machine from manufacturer's parts, you'd have to sell your house. If the parts really cost that much, it's a wonder they can sell their own version so cheaply.

[wpietri]

I think you're implying a unity to them, a coherence, that just doesn't exist. I think the more salient question would be something much longer involving the incentives of a half-dozen different people at a company that is mainly optimized for the wealth and ego of various high-status actors. The long-term incentives for effective operations are there, but they're blunted by managerialist priorities and overwhelmed by the short-term incentives for producing cash ASAP.

[rootusrootus]

That isn't limited to Electrolux in my experience, it may be fairly common. Samsung, for example, has exactly the same arms-length third party warranty support pattern. Wait a while, get a tech to come see what part needs to be replaced, wait some more, tech comes back to actually do the work. Meanwhile your appliance is out of service. Pretty soon it starts to look preferable to just discard the appliance and buy a new one even if that means spending a thousand bucks. Perhaps this is all by design.

Oh, and in case it needed to be said -- I strongly, strongly recommend avoiding Samsung for appliances. They are awful. The part of Samsung that does monitors and smartphones seems pretty great, but their appliance division makes abysmal stuff.

[FredPret]

Nothing sucks like Electrolux - this used to be their motto. For real.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZrQqnRhmZ0

[hnhg]

They supply white label items to Ikea too, at least in parts of Europe.

[saiya-jin]

Yeah and they are very much subpar, same as Whirlpool cca 12 years ago also sold through Ikea. Bought some kitchen appliances when buying Ikea kitchens (twice), all had some minor or not so minor issues.

Whirlpool fridge had door isolation strip uneven resulting in some heat coming in, from Day 1. Induction stove had few flat touch buttons responding only to strong pressure, kind of randomly, also Day 1. Electrolux - dish washer is well below average in quality of cleaning, our 15 years old Bosch does much better job. Also Electrolux - stove hood, something broke inside after maybe a year, so it performs at maybe 20% of the basic speed. Faster modes don't work at all and it shutdowns itself after maybe 5 mins. This one is especially annoying since its built into the wall.

Fuck these trashy brands, I'll never ever buy anything else from them. Its Siemens, Bosch and Miele, but mainly Bosch which doesn't command Miele's high price and reliability/features are OK for us. I am not rich nor patient enough to waste so much time, money and energy on anything else.

[moepstar]

> Its Siemens, Bosch and Miele, but mainly Bosch which doesn't command Miele's high price and reliability/features are OK for us.

From my experience, you can't go wrong with either of those - and, just in case you didn't know already, Siemens and Bosch are basically one - even operating under "BSH", Bosch/Siemens Home Appliances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSH_Hausger%C3%A4te

That also means that each company basically has their own version of each product - i.e. the same fridge with slightly different features (different tray combinations/heights/...) are available from both (varying model # of course) - and one may be even a little cheaper than the other...

[denton-scratch]

With Bosch, I was told by the installer that the only reason for paying for top-of-the-range models was for additional features. The underlying machinery is the same in all models.

To my reasoning, more features means more things to fail, means less reliable. And I've always disliked feeping creaturitis - I always use the same settings on appliances. And I get to pay less if there are less features; so I win both ways. What's not to like?

[gpvos]

I only recently became aware that their home appliances branch had been acquired by Electrolux somewhere in the 1990s. Brand awareness can be slow. AEG used to be a high quality brand for things like washing machines.

[denton-scratch]

I know; that's why I bought an AEG dishwasher. I replaced it with a Bosch, which still seems to be a decent brand. I've since downsized my home, and the dishwasher is now me.

  Love has ruined my body,
  Washing has ruined my hands.

~ Country Joe

[rootusrootus]

As a fellow Bosch dishwasher owner, I have to say they do seem to make a pretty decent appliance still. Not all of their appliances get the same acclaim, but for dishwashers the only real competition seems to be Miele (and they don't necessarily outperform in any short-term way, but have a reputation for just lasting 20 years instead of the usual 10).

[ahartmetz]

Bosch is not a public company, probably helps against short-term thinking.

[joezydeco]

I was really keen to get an Anova Precision Oven (countertop combi steam oven), but then found out that Anova is owned by Electrolux now. That kind of killed the deal for me.

[criddell]

My family had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner through the 1970's and 80's and that thing was a tank.