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Somehow our lord the efficient market decided that maintenance and repair are only for industrial scale things and consumer scale things must be inexorably driven to replace > repair I sometimes wonder if there’s a deeper fundamental theory there beyond economies of scale
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What kinds of items do you have in mind here? Third party computer / cell phone / car repair are ubiquitous, and I can't think of much else I'd have repaired outside of a warranty 🤔
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It is because the costs of trash utilisation ignore the impact on the environment. If you were to pay full costs (instead of postponing it to future generations), you would think twice before throwing something away.
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Total quality management made repair pointless for most things - they're perfect at the point of manufacture, and they didn't need to be designed for fixing ("rework") on the production line. It's all a side effect of quality control. Most things are.
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Repairs are, nearly always, "custom" -- and true customization (not just preplanned choice) costs $$$. Even if it is just the diagnosis of the problem that is custom, rather than the part itself, that unit of labor dominates the repair cost (vs. replacement of consumer goods).
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For entry level bicycles a new unit is only 2x the price of a tune up. You could probably actually save money by reselling year old bicycles on Craigslist and always having a new one over getting annual tune ups.