The door shelves in our crappy fridge at home have all gradually cracked and split and are held in place by messes of superglue and transparent Gorilla tape. Fed up with this, I priced up replacing them last week.
Part of that cost is molded plastic is cheap only while you have the molds. Once the fridge goes out of production they make a few for spares and then recycle the molds.
The solution to this is to address how spare parts must be handled. This is not easy, either you figure expected lifetime of the shelves vs rest of the fridge, and then order enough - but if you get it wrong you are still out. Or you keep the molds, which also implies equipment to use the molds - but that wears out over time as well and the new model might not use the old molds.
One is expensive, but most of the costs is setup/teardown so you just produce a bunch (perhaps 1000) for the warehouse when supply runs low. That is how companies that keep their molds function, but you pay for them to store the mold and have a warehouse with all the supply in, so spare parts are always a lot more expensive after full production has stopped.
Don't confuse spare parts with maintenance parts. If there are wear parts (filters, bearings...) that are expected to be replaced regularly there is a lot more turn over of the parts, and so everything is planned ahead around keeping the right amount of production going. These parts tend to be more industry standard parts bought off the shelf from a supplier that has other customers for the same part so your part order might go to the supplier who just puts a different label on the standard part and ships it to you.
I appreciate some of the rationale for the cost, however the fridge itself is less than five years old.
The solution here would be standardised fridge door shelf types, or better yet - sturdier designs that don't gradually crack when the door is shut 'a little jovially', billiarding glass jars around... .
Standardization is nice in theory, but I'm not sure if it is practical - designers like to make silly little changes for branding reasons all the time. Which is why your 5 year old shelf is probably out of production anyway.
As for sturdier designs: that is a design feature you need to be willing to pay for. Make sure you check on that in the next fridge and tell others. (Price is not a guide to quality - often but not always cheaper fridges are bought by those who buy enough to care about value and quality is a part of value, while the more expensive ones are targeted at people who buy fancy features and don't know to think about quality - but this is a maybe not a guide)
For sure, but if there were an ISO standard for fridge doors, I could at least get options that perhaps whilst not exactly the same as what I have aesthetically, would fit functionally.
As an ex/sometime-designer myself, I can appreciate why they'd want to make silly little changes ;)
And yes, as I admitted in my first post here - it IS a crappy fridge. I have only myself to blame.
It'll be cheaper to buy a new fridge.
They're just crappy moulded plastic
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