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FictitiousThreat t1_iro27kp wrote

How have you made a plastic basket last for almost 50 years?

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waehrik t1_iro3qsu wrote

Plastic stuff is nothing like it used to be. It was nice, durable, thick, and flexible. Now it's all just very brittle with barely enough plasticizers to make it last a little while. Plastic bins are constantly broken on store shelves because they're so fragile

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FictitiousThreat t1_iro4jk0 wrote

I don’t get it. Most Old plastics from the 60s and 70s were quite rigid and inflexible, and sitting around for 50 years usually makes them brittle as well. Plastics have actually improved a lot since then, so I’m thinking this basket of yours must’ve been pretty expensive when it was new to be such high quality. 🤷🏽‍♂️

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waehrik t1_iroa0mm wrote

That's exactly it, plastics nowadays can be and are value engineered and have the potential of being far better but most often aren't. There's a lot of survivorship bias here too. Because all of the cheap stuff from 50 years ago has long been sitting in the landfill. You can absolutely buy good stuff today but it'll cost a lot more

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turikk t1_irop9tt wrote

I'm glad you're admitting to survivorship bias since "they don't make it like they used to" is the oldest trope in the world. I'm pretty sure it's one of the phrases on the Rosetta stone.

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waehrik t1_irozk9z wrote

Absolutely. There's also the fact that back in the day things were intentionally overbuilt prior to the introduction of finite element analysis and CAD design. And engineers had to intentionally make things overbuilt in order to make sure they were sufficiently strong enough. Sometimes that meant it was adequate, other times it meant that it was so overbuilt that was impossible to break. Value engineering for many common products didn't exist 50 years ago because it wasn't possible.

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conanmack t1_irqxvss wrote

It was more likely that value engineering did exist but was not widely adopted. Every company must know the costs of production to survive and grow. Adjusting them through different business cycles.

Increasing shareholder value has most likely lead to a focus on value engineering and planned obsolescence. A constant stream of sales is deemed more important than solid and reliable products.

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waehrik t1_irsdjve wrote

Exactly, and just as with survivorship bias that's what skews the bias of "good" to smaller companies sometimes. Sometimes they truly are better but sometimes it's also because they didn't have the large resources to perform the value engineering analysis to perform the cost reduction so had to overbuild. Nowadays the bar to entry is so low that anyone can do it. So the often-smaller quality driven companies really stand out. Those are the modern ones we see for sale today though sadly they're few and far between.

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Ymirsson t1_irr2jc9 wrote

Also one of the phrases about the Rosetta stone.

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