pull down to refresh
Regardless of what's happening, it's an interesting question.
I recently went through a relevant personal experience. Our fridge broke down after only 4 years. The repair person told us there was a coolant leak. He said fridges don't last as long as they used to, partly because they now use a mix of aluminum and copper pipes (to save on costs), and welding the two metals together is error prone. He said all the manufacturers do this now.
I also did some research into fridges. It turns out that the most robust way to design them is to have the freezer on top, without a built-in ice-maker, which is how old fridges used to be (along with all copper pipes). But most modern fridges have the freezer on the side or the bottom, and come with ice-makers. For the dimensions we needed for our home, there are literally zero top-freezer options available, but I would have gladly sprung for one if the dimensions worked.
That definitely fits with my sense that the tradeoff between reliability and a complex feature set is pretty large.
Maybe, but I think we'd see more brands really try to stand out by maintaining quality standards if it were viable. The fact that this seems to be happening across the board, suggests to me that it's about tendencies in consumer sentiments.
Another version of that is that maybe high quality goods were never economically efficient and businesses are gradually finding the true equilibrium, now that decision makers have some distance from the customers.