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?
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.
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
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.
The level of technical knowledge needed to repair things has increased, while general technical knowledge has decreased. People aren’t reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950’s where “build a hovercraft from an old lawnmower” the building one.
Parts are also a huge problem. Where previously a car alternator, for example, was three discrete parts, alternator-rectifier–voltage regulator, that is now a single assembly. If one of those parts goes bad you need to replace the whole thing, unless you have used parts you can pull from. For some things the assembly is NLA, no longer available.
As for why it’s cheaper that comes down to manufacturers wanting to sell you a new one, not wanting to have to spend money on repair stock sitting somewhere, and possibly not having access to it themselves since very few manufacturers actually produce a complete product on their own.
For something simple like a Bluetooth speaker, the power supply comes from one company, the Bluetooth module and amplifier from another, the driver, a display board, the housing, someone designs it and puts that all together. If any one of those chains fails you may not be able to source the part to fix something.
There are usually workarounds to this but unless you are doing it yourself it will be cost prohibitive
Example: friend rented a house with a new stove, gas top, electric oven. Two months later the oven stopped working, motherboard was NFG (no fucking good), it was also NLA. So the landlord bought a new stove. The old one could have been made to work, but the complete functionally would not have been there. If my friend owned this I would have said ‘I can make it work, but you will be missing these features’.
I’m one of those people that has the technical knowledge to repair most electronics. I still buy new sometimes.
A while ago, I had to repair a faulty pellet stove. It was obvious that the main control board was bad (there was a single small circuit board connected to a handful of relays and sensors, all of which tested as good). This board contained a small cheap microcontroller, a few MOSFETs, and a handful of discrete components. A replacement was $500. Maybe $10 in parts at the most, and they wanted to charge me half the cost of the entire appliance.
I was able to isolate the problem to a bad MOSFET and order a new one for about 50 cents. Had this been a complex circuit, there’s no way in hell I could have found the problem without a schematic.
So in my opinion, the problem is twofold. Manufacturers want ridiculous prices for replacement parts, and no documentation exists to repair the parts themselves. They obviously have schematics from when they designed the board. They should be forced to release them.
The lack of documentation is a huge problem, if you opened up an old tube amp to fix it there was often a full schematic taped to the cover. Solid state amps often had component values stenciled right on the board.
What’s your background that you’ve developed this knowledge? I fantasize about learning to do some of my own electronics repair, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’ve looked at trade school and continuing education programs and some online resources, but I don’t want to be an appliance repair guy. I just want to know which component to order and replace when my Japanese hot water boiler burns out.
Let’s take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer’s description of what is wrong, and you’re prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you’re confident in your diagnosis.
Your typical job looks like this:
- Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
- Drive out to the person’s home (30 minutes).
- Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
- Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
- Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
- Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
- Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
- Drive back to your office (30 minutes).
There, that’s 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn’t need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn’t have had to remove an old one.
Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn’t have to waste too much time driving from place to place.
Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you’re also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.
The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn’t until you’re up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.
For $500 devices, it’s gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.
This assumes that the owner hasn’t already attempted to repair it themselves
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Some of the reason is indeed due to fuckery such as companies intentionally making things difficult or illegal to repair, however part of it is also due to economic reasons. If you’re trying to assemble something in the most economical way possible, you’re probably not going to go out of your way to also make it more repairable. You’re going to use single-use fasteners like rivets, glue, tack-welds, etc. - all things that are cheap to assemble the first time, but at the expense of more difficult disassembly later on.
In addition, diagnosing problems may be expensive depending on the appliance or machine. Would you spend four hours of your time repairing a dishwasher that could be replaced for $300? For some people it may be worth it; for some, not. I personally will spend quite a bit of time trying to repair something rather than replace it, however that’s more of an ideological choice rather than an economic one.
I can’t speak for everything, but I can speak for e-waste. Especially printers. Those things are made cheap as hell, but constructed so you can’t just get off the shelf parts. Being able to take the machine apart, find a replacement for whatever party is broken, install, and reassemble, you might have just bought a new printer for the same cost as the part. It’s almost the same with laptops, phones/tablets, televisions, etc. Brand doesn’t matter, it’s all the same. Right to repair doesn’t mean shit if you can’t even make the repairs.
It takes a huge shift in the US. There’s a stigma that if you don’t get new youre “a poor”. The funniest part is, the poorest people i know have a hatred for the poor. Like dude, you are 1 paycheck from being homeless but yes the homeless person is your issue not the tech billionaires.
Anyway, my mindset is the opposite in that im more disgusted by new and feel much happier with repair and reuse. But thats very rare. Not to mention late stage capitalism has made a lot of new stuff shit compared to old (cars, appliances, houses, consoles that don’t require Spyware and accounts to even play a single player offline game etc)
I got a 2007 miata. I’m doing everything i can to keep it running. I bought a manual and changed all the fluids and consumables. I’m also looking at an econobox electric like the Nissan leaf. If I can’t find something decent I’ll buy a early 2000s carburated motorcycle.
99 miata here too!
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.
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.
Old products were made so that each product lasted as long as possible.
So when one part failed, it was worth repairing because the rest was probably fine.
Modern products are designed to last X amount of time, so when one part fails, the rest of it is likely to fail soon.
Making repair not worth it.
You’re trying to treat this as one problem, but it’s specific depending on what you need. Like, you can 100% buy a fountain pen instead of using cheap disposables. But I doubt that’s what you’re talked no about.
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.
Well, clearly as others said, it’s the economy of scale: making large quantities of the same thing is cheaper than making small runs or one offs, and spare parts don’t sell as much, if an item is designed well (i.e. doesn’t break immediately).
But, I want to add something important IMHO: buying new because is cheaper isn’t really the problem, the problem is the waste it generates, and when we throw away (or hoard…) something, neither we nor the company that made the item pays for the cost of disposal. In fact, in many cases, the cost will be paid by society as a whole, sometimes by future generations. This is why it appears cheaper to buy new, but really, there’s a hidden cost that individuals and companies don’t directly pay.
If we could, somehow, make a company pay for the disposal of all the waste their products create, I tell you, repairing would be a lot more common.
