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
Yep. Add to that, they give things short lifespans these days - for instance with cars, many of the cuffs and pumps and moving parts are now plastic because they assume car = 10 years. So the internal quality has gone downhill, it’s cheaper than ever to manufacture new, but taking a 10 year old car and replacing every plastic part with another plastic part that will also fail would cost a small fortune… just buy a new car. They very much assume you’ll be landfilling and rebuying in no time. Reparability went away when we became a disposable society.
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.
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.
It only became cheaper to buy new over repairing the old because companies stopped producing replacement parts, and making things repairable.
If they never enshittified things to be unrepariable, repairing things would still be cheaper than buying a new one.
Encouraging people to repair things isn’t going to help much when a fuckton of things simply are not made in a way that they can even be repaired at home or even by the people who made the thing.
It’s more about industrialisation making new products really cheap. Think about a pair of trousers. They’re exactly as repairable as trousers ever were, and you can still get your trousers repaired economically. But the cost of a minor repair will total about half the price of a cheap pair of trousers. So there is little point repairing trousers unless they’re expensive - you may as well buy a new pair if they’re cheap.
This isn’t because of planned obsolescence, this is because clothing used to be far, far more expensive - you can come up with various multipliers but somewhere between 10x and 100x as expensive in terms of how many days of work was needed to pay for them. This is because industrialisation means that cloth and clothes can be made with a fraction of the labour as it did centuries ago.
Sewing machines have also made repairs much more efficient, but to a far lesser degree - someone doing clothing repairs has overheads beyond the limited bit of work that is sewing up a split seam or rip, which are almost non-existent for the business producing clothes in the first place.
So, if this is the case for simple items like clothes where repair itself is more economical nowadays, how much more true is it for complex items where each repair job is completely custom?
I have to wonder how much a needle and thread is where you are that buying a new pair of pants is cheaper than patching a hole/tear in the ones you already have. Clothing is one of the few things that doesn’t have this problem… But it also has an oversaturation problem so I could see pants being basically free in some parts of the world.
I’m talking about how much it costs to get this service, rather doing it yourself. It will take longer to do it yourself as someone who isn’t doing it every day (and you don’t have a sewing machine in this scenario, right?)
