Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff

That is utterly infuriating. Stuff like this really shakes my faith in capitalism.

To think that someone in charge at Bosch has actively decided to 1. Screw over the customer 2. Impose a massive external cost on society and the ecosystem. I honestly wonder how they sleep at night.

The market clearly can't fix this issue, so regulation must be the only option.

You are just too far away. Swedish politics is as sick a joke as in Italy.

- The school and high school results are in a state of implosion. No real political reaction.

- Because of internal political manoeuvres, the immigration policies were done so it will cost multiple times of the defence spending the coming years -- and risk a Spanish style housing crash.

- Putin acts more or less like Hitler in the mid 1930s. The defence is a joke, despite the politicians knowing this for a long time.

- For political reasons, there has been almost no building of housing over the last 20 years. During the same time, the population has increased by at least 10-15% because of political decisions...

- The trains are a joke because of bad upkeep. The problem seems to be that increased repairs won't make them work better until after the next election, so all governments spend the money in ways that buy votes better.

- And so on.

> More over, as labor is highly taxed in Sweden, it makes local repairing disproportionally more expensive compared to the manufacturing in a country with smaller labor costs.

Sounds like a very clear flaw in their economic and taxation model.

It's not "only" to screw consumers over. IMEstimation, vanishingly few consumers would repair a washer with a bearing failure, most because they assume the service call and repair would be $400+ and the new machine only about double that, so might as well just buy a new one. And the failure mode either sounds dramatic (like a jet engine coming apart in the spin cycle) and/or the machine starts putting brown grease onto the clothes, making people believe the problem is not a simple one.

I went through this with my in-laws who were all set to buy a new one when I noted that I could get the parts for under $100 delivered and tackle it when they came in. Most people just "call a guy" or "buy a new one" rather than tackle disassembly of their washer. (And that part is pretty daunting; when replacing them, I always assume that they start with the bearing and seal at the beginning of the assembly line and build the rest of the washing machine around that. :) )

In addition to saving money on the screws, the manufacturer could save money on the rubber tub gasket that seals the two tub halves together when fastened with screws, and save over a dozen assembly operations, all of which are likely manual (inserting the gasket, and inserting and tightening 12+ screws) That might save the manufacturer $5-7, which appears as $20-30 by the time the machine hits the retail floor.

Consumers will buy a $799 washer before they'll buy an otherwise seemingly identical $819 washer. If consumers want repairable items, they need to be willing to buy (and sometimes/often pay more) based on that preference.

For every consumer that lost money by having a hard to repair in the field tub, a few dozen saved $20+ on the initial purchase. It's unclear whether consumers won or lost overall on the trade, because that seal and then washer failure does seem to be what tends to do in the front loaders. It's pretty clear that the Earth lost, but that there might be more to gain by "training" people to repair their old stuff (or accept slight imperfections in old gear rather than discarding at the first hint of imperfection). That's a form of "nudging" as stated in the article.

Yeah, I started trying to cut it open, but it soon became clear I would never be able to put it back together and have it 100% watertight. Which is kind of a hard requirement in this case.