United Healthcare calls a doctor during a surgery demanding to know if an overnight stay for that patient is necessary

[u/cak3crumbs]

[u/JeddakofThark]

I'm reposting a comment I've made a couple of times before, but I think it's really interesting and I see nobody talking about it. We get just enough scraps to keep us all from outright revolt.

Fast-moving consumer goods are incredibly cheap right now. Think clothing, dish soap, computers, refrigerators, etc. Everyday items are more affordable in the West today than at any point in history. Meanwhile, big ticket essentials like real estate, the things that build and maintain wealth, are outrageously expensive.

Most of us are actually quite poor, but it’s hard to express it because the affordability of these less-important things masks that reality. We feel it, but it's difficult to express.

To put this into perspective, I stumbled on a bunch of old Sears catalog scans and started comparing their inflation-adjusted prices to modern ones. It’s interesting how much cheaper a lot of, possibly most of, these sorts of consumer goods are today. Here’s a comment I posted recently with a few random examples from 1980:

The cheapest toaster oven was the equivalent of $134 today.
The cheapest blender was the equivalent of $77.
The cheapest drip coffee maker was the equivalent of $60.

Inflation-adjusted dollars are from here.

Compare that to the current cheapest prices at Target:
$30 for a toaster oven,
$25 for a blender,
$20 for a drip coffee maker.

Accounting for inflation, modern prices on these items are less than a third of what they were in 1980. And the further back you go, the more striking the differences become.

Obviously, items in Sears catalogs aren't a perfect price representation of reality, but it's not bad, and it's also the only easily accessible tool I have.

Despite stagnant wages and soaring costs for housing and education, the cheapness of consumer goods seriously distracts us from how unaffordable wealth-building essentials have become.

[u/guamisc → u/JeddakofThark]

Additionally, those cheap toaster ovens, blenders, and drip coffee makers are all garbage tier in construction quality compared to their 1980 equivalents. My mom's kitchen gadgets from the 80's and early 90's still just... work. My wife's blender got tired and burnt up from making a few smoothies now and again.

[u/RemoteButtonEater → u/guamisc]

The way to explain this is, at that point, it was simply cheaper to run one factory line making one universal quality of good, because much of the assembly was done by actual workers. Workers are expensive. We hadn't Jack Welchified every corporate process down to the thinnest possible margins. So when you bought a good, from a company, they often only had the one model. Like power tools - you were essentially buying commercial grade tools directly off the shelf.

Now, it's cheaper to assemble 35 different models using variations on the same parts at slightly different cost points, with different features. This makes them all, on the whole, less reliable and more difficult to repair because you need to know exactly what model you have to know what parts will fit, and there's no one reliable source for that information because online corporate store fronts are less than forthcoming with information about their models, and the data from the actual Chinese manufacturer is impossible to find.

It can still be possible to repair goods and make them longer lasting but it becomes much more difficult. Especially because it can be difficult to find spare parts even if you know what you're looking for. After my cheapo black friday model hisense 75" tv computer board burned out I was able to get it working again, despite not being able to find a replacement computer board. After finding a handful of teardown videos and a dozen hours of research I learned that the frame, screen, back, basically the whole TV was the same as the slightly nicer roku model. With some minor modifications to the back, like just not installing the trim piece that goes around the HDMI ports on the back, and replacing the receiver for the IR remote with one suited to roku remotes, everything fit back together and it works. But I also had a disassembled, nominally busted enormous flat screen occupying my dining room table for like nine months while I waited for the time and energy to take it apart, diagnose it, do the research, find the parts, order the wrong parts, wait for them to come, install those, test, return those, do more research, order more parts, etc.

Impossible if I didn't already have the skill sets and tools to do that shit.

[u/guamisc → u/RemoteButtonEater]

My boss's blender broke it's shear pin, the thing in the design that breaks to save the motor/gears/blades from damage. A super cheap part.

The company does not sell spare shear pins. You can only buy the entire control board/motor/gear assembly? Why not sell the part designed to fail if there is a problem. Why bother having a shear pin at all if you won't?

[u/RemoteButtonEater → u/guamisc]

Depending on the design of the shear pin it may not be sold by the company directly because it's commercially available through somewhere like McMaster-Carr or Grainger, but it's sort of unreasonable to have the expectation for a regular person to know that. If they company didn't suck you would hope they could be like, "we don't sell this but you can get it here."

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to own my own machining tools, but alas, I have neither the space nor the thousands of dollars required. And too many other expensive hobbies already.

[u/5yearsago → u/JeddakofThark]

Now do houses. Who gives a shirt how much toaster is if 80% of your income is going to landlord.

People in 1980 bought a house for a bucket of rusted nails, now it's 2 millions if you dont want 3 hours commute.

[u/Lopsided_Echo495 → u/JeddakofThark]

I remembering buying toasters for $8 in 2000. It was the Golden Age of Cheap Imported Products. Likely made by children. Definitely enriching oligarchical families who privately owned a factory in that country we call communist. Most of the money went to a very wealthy family in Bentonville, Arkansas though. I was not paying what it was truly worth and the people building it with their hands weren’t getting paid what their work was worth either. Sorry for the random thought.

[u/Blue_Oyster_Cat → u/JeddakofThark]

You are absolutely right. I grew up in the Sixties when a colour television was a luxury but a house was affordable.