Sir, Your Fridge Is Toast, I’m Sorry

OK, so maybe your washer or your dryer or your fridge or your freezer is six or eight or ten years young, chugging along merrily enjoying the prime of life. It’s not new nor is it old, and the troublesome teenage years are distantly ahead. Should have another fifteen or twenty trouble free years before the gates of landfill afterlife, right? Then out of nowhere one sunny morning it coughs, sputters, jiggles around a bit and wham, a 911 call to a repairman. He arrives, takes the cover panels off, hums and haws a bit, suggests you take a seat while he tries to read your mood, and delivers the tried and tested and way too often parlayed prognosis. It’s toast, kaput, flat-lined, and not economically repairable. “This just can’t be!” you exclaim, “I just bought it yesterday!”  

We’ve all been there. “They ain’t what they used to be” is more than a colloquialism. The white appliances that we need to make our lives run smoothly are junk, period. Honest sales people have long since struggled to impart confidence in their products. A whole lot of eye rolling ensues when you ask how long it will last, or even more to the point, is it any good? The sales person will carefully select safe words like, “They all last about the same” or “This one has this feature and that one has that feature” which are subjectively noncommittal and really don’t tell you squat about life expectancy and product quality. Of course there’s always the sales people who defy what you’ve already gleaned from Google as they smilingly tell you that their appliance will last you through to your retirement, which only plays true if you’ve recently signed the papers and have one foot out your employers door. 

By contrast, our old Viking chest freezer has been chugging along handsomely for fifty-five years; a fine example of yesteryear quality and bulletproof design. Back in the day, quality, price, and long life expectancy were integral to a manufacturer’s triumph in the marketplace. Manufacturers stood behind their products with pride. Warranties were not a selling feature, as the need to exercise a warranty seldom emerged, but when it did, support was there. More attention was paid to the design room than the board room. 

CBC’s Marketplace did an expose on white appliances a few weeks back. The comments by repair technicians in regard to product quality were nothing short of humorous, as were the comments of sales people. Both held no punches in that the products in today’s market are inferior. Over the years, most of the old tried and true “go to” brand names have cycled through bankruptcy to be reinvented in name only by a couple of very large manufacturing conglomerates. In short, this lucrative sector is no longer kept honest by the powerful forces of competition. A few companies make all of the rules, so the field is decidedly tilted in their favour.  

Long ago, top executives were well compensated to manage the success of the company, and they were held responsible for failures. Salaries were high but realistic. Now, the company is managed solely to ensure the financial success of top executives. It is not uncommon for executives to be paid one hundred to four hundred times the amount paid to on-the-shop-floor management. I am a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, but this is obscene! To the consumer’s detriment, capitalism is evolving to the point where it is no longer sustainable in some cases. The unanswered question becomes, does the excessive executive compensation return good bang for the buck? Maybe a “management team” that is paid in a more realistic compensation range could refocus the business back to the product and profit from meeting the needs of the consumer. A novel concept indeed.    

Time for change. It’s time for quality, longevity, and economy to return to the major appliance marketplace. I don’t expect to see this change rise out of the current, overwhelmingly non-competitive, environment of this sector, but it could rise through a cooperative solution. Guided by the cooperative principles, a model could grow to design and produce the solid, quality products that the marketplace is asking for, while returning good, competitive salaries to the employees. Cooperation means one person, one vote and cooperation means reasonable compensation, from the shop floor through to the board table. An idea worth organizing? Maybe?