Now am angrier.
Have to replace the switch on my circular saw power tool, When clicking a reasonable price one, takes you nowhere. The exact Skil brand is of course, obsolete, not available anywhere. Dump a tool because the manufacturer does not want to make them anymore ? Screw the customers ! policy...





What are they smoking ? Is it time now to buy used tools at Goodwill to salvage a fken part because vendors and the postal service want to pay their mortgage in one sale ?

 

Not sure what your point here is. Are you saying that a manufacturer should continue making every part for every product they've ever made for all of eternity?

 

Sometimes having a 3D printer can be very handy.

 

Not sure what your point here is. Are you saying that a manufacturer should continue making every part for every product they've ever made for all of eternity?

As impractical as that sounds, in decades past it used to be a good reason to buy from Sears or Montgomery Wards. Everything came with a parts diagram and you could indeed order parts for many years. These days the parts diagrams are nearly worthless because any custom parts are no longer available by the time you need them.

I've often thought a manufacturer could find success advertising that their appliance could be repaired well into the future because it contained only generic parts. Like the opposite of "No user serviceable parts inside".

 

My grandfather used to shop around flea markets and pickup an entire appliance for one of its parts to use in repairing one at home. The whole used appliance was often if not always cheaper than the cost of the replacement parts.

 

The pricing is a function of where and when. Parts are made by the millions at a very low cost. Each person that touches the part doubles the price. ACE Hardware store will keep it on the shelf for a year and triple the price. There will be $35 of shipping for one part, or two or 20, or $38 for 100 to 500 parts.
Last year there will be 10% tariff if you spend over $300. Now there will be 50%, 100%, 140% or who knows.

 

A $5 used microwave oven at the local "peddler mall" is an excellent alternative to a $9.9999 microswitch plus $19.99999 'shipping, tax and handling' robbery trend. Extra good 'tested' guts fuse, lamp, magnetron, blower, capacitor, transformer... parts are a bonus.

That facebook marketplace has now thousands of cars selling 'for parts only'. Small scale wreck yards due to abuse in parts prices. Last month I bought a steering gearbox for less than a tenth of store price. USPS got richer, though.

 

A $5 used microwave oven at the local "peddler mall" is an excellent alternative to a $9.9999 microswitch plus $19.99999 'shipping, tax and handling' robbery trend. Extra good 'tested' guts fuse, lamp, magnetron, blower, capacitor, transformer... parts are a bonus.

That facebook marketplace has now thousands of cars selling 'for parts only'. Small scale wreck yards due to abuse in parts prices. Last month I bought a steering gearbox for less than a tenth of store price. USPS got richer, though.

If you want to talk about abuse in pricing -- consider that that small scale wreck yard probably buys the entire car for between $50 and $500 and turns around and sells many of the parts off of it for many times what they paid for the entire car. I junked my Ford Probe back in about 2010 and got $300 for it. While I was there, they called up a customer that had been looking for a turbocharger off of that engine and told him that they had just gotten one in and that they could let him have for $1500 (the guy that made the call didn't realize that I was the person that had just sold them the car). By the same token, they are buying cars on spec knowing that some fraction of them they will never sell a single part from.

As for shipping -- it frankly amazes me that any of the shippers can move packages to nearly anywhere on the planet in just a few days for the prices they charge. Anyone that thinks that they are way overcharging for their services is free to form a competing company and take all of their business away by charging a fraction of rate.

 

When auto parts stores have long lines and car dealers laid off the salesmen, we have hard times ahead. My dad remembered the 1930s very well. Fix it, don't buy anything.

 

As impractical as that sounds, in decades past it used to be a good reason to buy from Sears or Montgomery Wards. Everything came with a parts diagram and you could indeed order parts for many years. These days the parts diagrams are nearly worthless because any custom parts are no longer available by the time you need them.

I've often thought a manufacturer could find success advertising that their appliance could be repaired well into the future because it contained only generic parts. Like the opposite of "No user serviceable parts inside".

It was certainly more practical in the past for manufacturers to have stable product lines using the same parts in different models for many, many years. This also resulted in it being sensible to makes those parts durable and repairable. This was possible because the technology didn't change significantly from one model year to the next. By a refrigerator or washing machine in 1965 and it was going to be very similar to the one you bought in 1985. We bought a new washer in 1973 (I remember the year because it was just before my mom had her crippling stroke) for about $300, which would be the equivalent of well over $2000 today, making it a very major purchase given that our household income was right at $12k at that time (which was somewhat above the median, but not by a lot). When you pay well over a full week's wages for an appliance, you definitely expected (and needed) that thing to last and be serviceable. Today, you can still by a comparable washing machine (top load, no frills) for about $300, or about a single day's wages for a median household, and even that very basic model has quite a few more features. But the quality most certainly isn't as high, largely because it isn't demanded by the bulk of customers. This is even far more true for TVs and other electronics in which people have no intention when they buy it of having it for more than a year or two, as they fully expect to want to upgrade to whatever wonderful new things will come along next year. People on this forum, myself included, tend to fall at the other end of the spectrum. We want a phone, and a TV, and a DVD player, and a fridge, and a microwave, that are going to last ten or twenty years because we have little desire or intention of "upgrading" from something that satisfies our needs. We have better things to do with our time and money. But we are not in the bulk of customers that companies have to serve. In that kind of market, companies simply can't survive by selling rock-solid models that are largely the same year after year; they have to make each model obviously different with clearly visible new features, which means their product lines are constantly changing at a rapid pace. The same is true for many of the component parts they are purchasing to build their products, so that even if they wanted to, they couldn't keep their models very static for an extended period of time or hope to be able to source many of the parts for models that are even just a few years old.