[ghaff]

I must have hallucinated that I went to an auto dealer for warranty service last week.

Enterprise software companies have consulting and support services.

At the consumer level though, most people aren't willing to pay for the cost of the manufacturer or retailer repairing clothing and other relatively low cost items. As in this article, there are local businesses that do such things but it can be really hard to justify for lower cost items. I have had shoes resoled and otherwise repaired but haven't done it in years and probably most recently a pair of very expensive custom hiking boots that were made to be repairable. (And the repair was probably $200 or so.)

[wholinator2]

While i do take your point, i think a big problem with discussions about "big businesses" is that they are completely different most of the time. A sofa =/= a car =/= enterprise software. But then how do discussions happen? A sofa is just a thing to sit on at home, you undoubtedly have other things to sit on. Needing to repair a sofa is not catastrophic to survival. Needing to repair a family car can be catastrophic to an individual or family. Needing to repair enterprise software can be catastrophic to a large business itself. There's hugely different consequence scales here, which i guess correlates with how willing a "large" company is to provide the desired support

[gershy]

I think there's some argument that at scale, the mass decision to replace rather than repair furniture is catastrophic.

[brewdad]

At the consumer level it frequently doesn't make sense to repair an item. My son had a part fail on his luggage last winter. It might be covered under warranty (the manufacturer wouldn't commit until inspecting the product) but the repair would require shipping the suitcase to them and paying for return shipping. It was going to cost about $150 minimum to have it repaired on a piece that is already a decade old and could be replaced for $200 on sale. I have seen this repeated many times across products.

[ghaff]

I've had minor clothing repairs/alterations done at a local dry cleaner for a fairly nominal sum. (Maybe $10-15) But if you can't just easily do something yourself, yeah, you tend to be looking at a floor of at least $100 and at least a certain amount of hassle.

Things I might have taken in to be repaired 25 years ago like a laser printer just don't make sense to do so today.