appliances are built to fall apart now too. It’s called “shortening the replacement cycle” or “planned obsolescence”. Everything you buy has a fatal flaw incorporated into its design which ensures that the product will become unusable at some point and things are being designed to fall apart faster and faster. Americans ought to be furious about this.
they actually have obsolescence departments now that work day and night to figure out how to shorten the life of a product
So basically when someone asks someone who does that work what they do for a job the answer, if honest is “I try to make products way more expensive for people by shortening the product’s lifespan”
I worked for a company that made wall mount machines for cutting glass. They would continue to machine replacement parts for customers for models that were 60 years old or more. The owner asked what the company do to increase sales, an engineer stated that if we made machines that didn’t last so long our sales would go up. He was let go within a week.
in the sixties there was a backlash against planned obsolescence. One of the factors in the consumer movement.