> Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland.
From what I've read, their weight and bulkiness makes shipping from Asia to Europe costly, and this negates the potential gains from moving production to say China.
> Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day.
I think these two events have a common root cause - the corporations have been trying to squeeze more and more profits, esp. since the seventies, which resulted in both sending production abroad and amping up planned obsolescence. As a counterexample, Russian appliances from the USSR era were actually pretty solid, with a lot of them going on for 20-30 years without repairs. It wasn't caused by rigorous manufacturing standards and QA (as the were both terrible/borderline nonexistant), but by good, simple designs which had longetivity as a design goal.
From what I've read, their weight and bulkiness makes shipping from Asia to Europe costly, and this negates the potential gains from moving production to say China.
> Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day.
I think these two events have a common root cause - the corporations have been trying to squeeze more and more profits, esp. since the seventies, which resulted in both sending production abroad and amping up planned obsolescence. As a counterexample, Russian appliances from the USSR era were actually pretty solid, with a lot of them going on for 20-30 years without repairs. It wasn't caused by rigorous manufacturing standards and QA (as the were both terrible/borderline nonexistant), but by good, simple designs which had longetivity as a design goal.