[wat10000]

If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it.

The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.

Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.

[xandrius]

You're confounding variables here, the cost of repairing a microwave is actually very often 0.1%: the part they broke and the work required to fix it is often nil.

Unless, you have businesses fighting for it to be repaired by making the microwave schematics impossible to find, the casing stupidly hard to open, etc. If you then have that a repair part is impossible to be found then of course only the truly motivated will attempt (and sometimes succeed).

Example: a friend bought an ebike with a bosch motor. Something happened and it stopped working. Now the only thing that is possible to be done with it, due to how the system has been constructed, it's to have it replaced by warranty and/or insurance. This is because there are locks on the battery that prevents it from being removed to safely analyse the system, the engine is covered by one piece that makes its opening borderline impossible, etc.

On the other hand, I have a top of the line ebike motor (Tosheng) that can be fully opened, its firmware modified and schematics and parts can be easily found online. That meant that when another friend had his motor break down, he could open it, see that it was only a gear that failed and replaced it for less than $10, he only needed to unscrew a coupleof screws to see what happened. With the world we are moving towards, the company would make you throw away the WHOLE bike instead of changing a broken gear.

[wat10000]

You're ignoring costs. If your microwave costs $100, then you're saying it's often ten cents to fix it. It is entirely possible that the bad component costs ten cents. But the cost of the repair is only ten cents if your time and travel is completely free. Let's say you have a well designed microwave that's easy to repair and a ten-cent component goes bad. How much do you think a repair shop in a wealthy country would have to charge for such a repair to keep the lights on? A 100% margin on that 10 cents won't even pay for the time the worker takes to say "hello" as you enter the shop. What's your optimistic estimate of how long it would take to replace such a component on a well designed unit? 10 minutes? Plus administrative overhead like collecting payment, probably storing the unit for a while until the customer picks it up, and dealing with "it was working fine until you touched it" idiots. And 10 minutes is extremely optimistic for something that's likely soldered (even highly repairable units are going to solder small stuff). How much does the repair person earn? Auto mechanics make maybe $25-30/hour in the US. Pad that significantly for their fully loaded cost to the business. If we assume it takes 20 minutes total, accounting for everything, you're looking at maybe $20 in actual costs for the business, not counting rent and equipment and such. You've already hit an appreciable portion of the cost of a new unit and that's with a lot of very generous assumptions.

Appliance repair might be a dying art but car repair is common. You can look there to see what simple tasks might actually cost. Something like installing new tires is probably comparable. It's not outrageously expensive but it's also not anything like ten cents.