Repair labor is a huge percent of the repair cost, and includes no warranty, and hence the incentive to just buy new. If the government is going to intervene, maybe what they ought to do is a.) reduce the VAT on repairs, b.) require a 90-180 day whole device warranty, c.) increase the VAT on new products. a) and b) would approximately cancel each other cost wise to the consumer, but give them more confidence in the repair process, which a) alone doesn't do; and c) increases the spread in cost between repair vs new which was the point of a).
Of course the ideal would be to make it just as easy to disassemble consumer devices as it is to assemble them. i.e. if the cost of disassembly were equal to or less the value of physical materials in the product.
The incentive for companies is to design products that are obsolete after a few years, such that they can sell a new one and make money on the new sale. While it's beneficial for customers to be able to repair their devices, their choices are limited by the availability of repairable devices.
The government has plenty of levers to use to improve repairability and reducing the amount of discarded electronics. They could mandate a minimum service life for electronics, where the manufacturer has to repair or replace any device that fails during that service life, for free, as long as the repair isn't due to customer negligence. They could mandate having a serviceability score label on electronics, just like the energy star rating or nutritional information label. They could require that manuals and parts are available to third party repair shops, without discriminatory pricing and availability. The list goes on.
It's not unlike fuel efficiency and clean air mandates. Once all the manufacturers had to abide by the same rules, unsurprisingly, fleet efficiency and air quality improved.
I like the idea in principle, but the cost of repairing something is so huge - due to direct labour costs and related social expenditures - that it is very difficult to change this balance with just VAT rate adjustments.
Fixing a five-year-old TV might cost 200$ (but you don't know, there's no guarantee). A new TV costs 300$. Now, if you reduce the VAT for fixing work from 25% to 12 %, the repair cost goes down to 180$.
Is that big enough difference to change the way people act? Mostly not. We still realise that the fixed TV might break at another point next week, and there is no warranty. If I just throw away the old thing and buy a new TV, it'll have 6 or 12 month warranty and 2 year defect liability. So it's still a better buy to get a new one.
Plus the new TV probably has more features than the old one.
How about at a rate of $parts + $labor? If the device was defective and broke then it would still be the manufacturer's responsibility to fix it. But if it breaks due to wear and tear, accidental damage, or intentional damage then the user should reasonably foot but bill (either out of pocket or with insurance).
The article says that consumers are discouraged by the cost of repair.
A few weeks ago, I repaired an eltronical appliance and was surprised to see that all screws were screwed into plastic. As I unscrewed them to access the inside of the device, the plastic around the screw broke.
I think there should be laws that prevent screwing into plastic. That just makes no sense appart from upfront cost. Once the plastic is broken, there is no way but to throw the broken device away. Unless you can somehow glue everything back together, but that seems unpractical.
It's like devices are not even planned to be repaired. They are designed to be sold and then abandoned. That's the real issue. Not cost of repair.
I really don't think this is a good idea. It will surely make things more expensive for consumers and as a consumer we agree to to buy the product regardless of the repairability. If you want to buy things that are repairable then you need to make it known to the manufacturer that this is something consumers want (i.e. vote with your wallet).
That doesn't work for the simple reason that there is no market, therefore there is no way to determine that price. The whole point is essentially that the manufacturer can only have the monopoly on repairs if they are free, if they want to charge for it, they have to allow competition.
As for intentional damage, I think that should not be handled based on costs at all, but simply based on depreciation. Based on normal durability of the device, if you damage the device, you have to pay the remaining value in order to get a new device.
What we really need is financial penalties on companies that make stuff deliberately hard to repair. Set up a department of the Consumer Rights Bureau (or whatever it's called) where people can report devices the've been unable to fix due to deliberate obfuscation/etc., and that forces manufacturers to refund the consumer the entire purchase sum of that device no matter how old it is.
Anecdote: my washing machine recently broke the main bearing, and I was going to fix it. Even found a nice teardown/reassembly vid on Youtube of the exact same model (a bit older than mine). After 2 hours of work, I discover Bosch has gone from using screws on the outer drum to plastic welding it shut. So fixing it means replacing the entire assembly, costing 2/3 of a new machine and with a four week delivery time for the part. I learned this is only done to screw consumers over, and that all manufacturers do it now. The drum still has all the mounting tabs for being screwed together, so they're literally just saving $0.30 on screws.
I'm not sure how we can get back to the previous balance. Fundamentally, the cost of an item is a combination of materials and labor to manufacture (setting IP issues aside). Goods are now much cheaper compared to repair labor because automation has dramatically reduced the amount of manufacturing labor required. To make things cheaper to repair than to buy, we'd need to either make them artificially more expensive (thus making them unavailable to many people) or make repair cost a pittance. Since troubleshooting and repair is inherently less automatable than manufacturing, the only way to significantly reduce the cost of repair is to pay people much less for repairs. And then who will want to do repairs for you?
> With low-cost products, the strategic response for manufacturers would be to lower new product prices and flood the market, thus reducing the appeal of repair.
This isn't a bad thing. Let them sell their products as cheaply as they want, but as long as the repair option is cheaper than the buy new option, most people will repair. Even if it's cheaper to buy new many will still repair if that repair is easy enough. It's a lot easier to stick with something you know works, fits your needs, and is already in place than it is to throw it away and replace it by rolling the dice on some cheap electronic good from china which might not work at all, and may not do everything as well. The lazy/safe option is very attractive to consumers.
> If independent repair was widely available, products would have a longer lifespan, making them more valuable. Manufacturers would be incentivized to raise new product prices, which hurts consumers.
That doesn't make much sense. If everyone can just keep using their valuable old thing, companies will have to bring down the price on the new thing to get them to buy it. Even people who do buy the new version can sell their valuable old one to someone else who now doesn't have to buy the new one. In the face of reduced demand for a new product, raising the price for it would be crazy.
Any electronics product from a major manufacturer will have provisions made for repairs. Some repair/refurbishing center will have bid for the repair contract, promising to repair FooPhones at $23/unit or whatever. They will get documentation, parts from the manufacturer, and train a bunch of people in FooPhone repair. Then when Timmy drops his brand new FooPhone, the manufacturer can tell him that for just $79.99, he'll get a factory refurbished one in 2-3 weeks.
Those supposed costs you talk about were already incurred. It's just a requirement that the manufacturer not just limit repairs to "factory authorized" repair centers. There's a very similar debate going on about repairability of automobiles.
I'm arguing against making a repair that needs to be done 3% of the time cost $200 more in order to save $0.05 on the price of the device.
Labor specialization is supposed to make things more efficient. You have some expert who can do the job in five minutes that would take you an hour, and then you can justify paying them ten times your own hourly rate for those five minutes.
It doesn't do any good to cause something to take the high-paid expert an hour instead of five minutes, all it does send the device to the landfill because the repair becomes uneconomical.
This is great, although it somehow seems to me to be starting in the wrong end. The underlying problem is that it is more profitable/cheaper to just give you a new product (if something breaks while under warrantee) and then just throw away the old instead of repairing it. I don't know if it is because the externalities of waste are not taxed properly or if it is because manufacturing products that are hard to repair gives more robust products and less waste in the end.
Except that repair costs be too much in many cases (ie the replacement part or the labor cost) that it is cheaper to buy a new product for just a little more.
I’m a fan of this too, essentially the idea would front-load the cost of repairs into the product as a consumption tax at the point of sale. This internalizes the externalities of this planned obsolescence.
But of course it’s not really a fixed price and the manufacturer is tacitly encouraged to compete in total lifecycle price rather than to do the “cheap out on a structural part to save 2 cents” thing. Which is the ultimate goal.
If what you want is for products to last a while, thats the way to do it. Legislate the lifecycle you want and let vendors compete on optimizing their products for that lifecycle. The free market will happily give you planned obsolescence, we are already in a market failure, and it’s not going to work itself out by just “making consumers more informed” or whatever pablum - if that worked you wouldn’t be in a market failure to begin with. Staying the course and “spreading awareness” has always been a vote against actual change.
They do not need to pay more. The equation that repairable means more expensive for the customer is propaganda. It assumes that every cent companies save by making devices worse lowers the price. That's trickle down economics and has never been true.
People can still buy new stuff earlier if they want. But their old stuff can be reused by those that do not need, want or can afford the new devices. There are many categories of devices where that's a good option for many, not only phones. Besides, it's always good to have the option to repair that thing you have when it breaks even if initially you did not think you would need that. You might have grown to like it.
I'm almost the diametric opposite of that; I believe that manufacturers shoud be compelled to build things to be easy to take apart, replaceable, and upgradeable, if that can be done at a net-zero cost, and should be subsidized by the state if it can't, possibly with tax breaks.
But I don't believe that they should be required to keep it under warranty in that case. I'm fine with a company putting a warranty seal on a device if they don't want people to touch the insides.
Good point about support - I think this scenario could be more realistic if there were regulations in place which force manufacturers to enable third party repair (schematics, sale of parts etc).
It's working well already with cars - in places where labor is cheap things like older BMWs get extended life, as the same repairs wouldn't be affordable in other places, and as a consumer you get the benefit of driving a decent car for a reasonable price.
I see quite a bit of refurbishers in my area selling ex-leased laptops for a low price with a warranty, so it looks like the market finds a way.
My point is, there are upsides to buying new, but I think the environmental downside is much much greater.
As long as businesses can pass along the cost of disposal to customers or elsewhere, they have every incentive to fight repairs.
Maybe forcing buy-back of broken products at a significant fraction of the original price? Though that'd incentivize "home appliances as a service" or fly-by-night businesses.
I think a good way to ensure repairability is to require manufacturers to honor a relatively long warranty. For example many large appliances have 1 year warranties. After that you have to pay to repair (which is often 25-50% of the cost of new and not guaranteed) or toss it and buy new. If there were required warranty service based on waste generated from an item, eg a refrigerator must be warranted for 20 years, then you would see much better reliability and repairability.
Smaller, cheaper, more tech heavy items might have shorter required warranties, but the point is that you need to align the incentives by forcing manufacturer to bear the cost of the repair.
Of course the ideal would be to make it just as easy to disassemble consumer devices as it is to assemble them. i.e. if the cost of disassembly were equal to or less the value of physical materials in the product.
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