I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing appliances getting worse across the board. I don't buy enough of them to really know if the trend holds overall but the correlation is pretty much perfect between how new an appliance is and how much I hate it. For example the controls on my new LG washer and dryer are incredible bad. They've made it hard to impossible to just set the run level manually to push you into set programs for bedding or whatever. But they never work right! We've given up on using those programs entirely because they are terrible.

The main culprits I've seen are cheaping out on quality, replacing traditional controls with touch screens or "AI" magic buttons, and squeezing in more monetization streams or adding gimmicky features that actively make the product worse.

Maybe things will turn around someday. There are a few rays of hope, like the touchscreen fad in cars gradually losing its luster, but it seems like we've been on the wrong path for a long time and I'm not sure it will ever correct.

I'm also a software engineer and recently got new LG washer and dryer.

I have not yet figured out how to manually change the settings, as the buttons don't do anything when you press them.

I leave it on "normal" and it seems fine, and surely there is a way to activate those buttons, but I haven't found it.

I could probably install the app on my android device and use it to connect them to wifi, where I could presumably configure them.

Instead, however, I am looking at electronics-free diesel trucks.

I have an LG washer/dryer as well. On mine, you need to rotate the large central knob by one "click", then the buttons start to work.

Why? No idea.

How's that diesel truck research going? I've thought about getting into auto repair as a hobby, but wrenching on modern cars would basically be my day-job with added wire fiddling.

I learned that most diesel cars and trucks are still dependent on electronics for fuel injection and also have a higher minimum-quality of diesel.

The prepper nerds seem to advocate for Cummins 12-valve engines from the 1990s or the Toyota 1HZ.

There's a whole lot of old diesel LandCruisers out there. I'm guessing that's the sweet spot for it still being a normal car that mechanics can maintain while still being comfy and looking cool.

You can avoid buying crap with obfuscated UIs... mostly.

Maybe a washer can be made without electricity. Have a tank of cold compressed air and use a blow torch to heat it and make new compressed air.

Look up the Wonderwash. It basically looks like a small propane tank on an axle that you manually spin to wash your cloths. It works surprisingly well for washing cloths without electricity.

How long does it take to manually dry a normal load with that thing? My dryer takes at least an hour to dry a modest sized load of normal clothes so I would expect a non-powered one to take many hours, but maybe my modern dryer is really so bad it doesn't save much time.

With the first few loads I wrung cloths out by hand and tossed them in the dryer. I didn't notice it being longer, but I also didn't time it so 20-30% longer wouldn't surprise me.

After a few loads I bought a hand crank cloths wringer, basically two rollers that squeezes the water out. That thing honestly works better than a spin cycle, cloths are more dry than coming out of the washer and I have noticed the dryer finishing faster (I usually run it on an auto sense mode rather than a timer).

> I can't compare exactly but I feel like today the business pays more, the customer pays more, the drivers get paid less and it's all subsidized by investors to boot. Am I totally wrong on this?

It is exactly that! Food delivery is an excellent example of 'things just got worse'.

In 2019, 'delivery' was a specialty a restaurant would have to focus on to offer. Pizza places (Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, etc) and other specific delivery-focused restaurants (such as Panera Bread, Jimmy Johns, or your local Chinese restaurant) would have actual W2 employees who did delivery driving, as part of their job. The restaurant would want deliveries to go well (for both the customer, as well as the driver), so would make sure their own staff had reasonable access to food, some light training, and would ensure they could deliver it somewhat well. (They would reject orders too far away, they wouldn't serve food that wouldn't survive a delivery trip well, etc)

In post-COVID 2025, "every" restaurant offers delivery, but almost no restaurant still employs their own delivery drivers (locally, Jimmy Johns might be the only one left). Everyone else just outsourced to DoorDash. DoorDash drivers are employees who are 'legally-not-employees' (1099 employees), so they no longer have any direct access to the restaurants, and they can't train well for any specific service, because they might have to visit any-of-50 restaurants on any given day, all of which have entirely different procedures (even if they are the same brand or chain). Restaurants have zero incentive to ensure deliveries go well (the drivers aren't their employees, so they no longer care about turnover, and customers have to use DoorDash or Uber Eats or equivalent, because almost every restaurant uses it, so there's no downside to a DoorDash delivery going bad).

Prices to consumers are double-to-higher than what they were in 2019, depending on the restaurant. Wages are down, employment security is entirely eliminated. Quality and service have tanked.

Presumably, investors make slightly more money off of all of this?

And on paper the idea for services like Doordash was good - 3rd party delivery company so the restaurant doesn't have that liability, staff, or investment, delivery people aren't working for just one store so they have more work if the one restaurant is quiet, etc.

But since it's all investor and profit driven for the bigger company, costs get cut on every side.

> But since it's all investor and profit driven for the bigger company, costs get cut on every side.

These services basically don't work with Western level wages. The economics are just not there.

> These services basically don't work with Western level wages. The economics are just not there.

Only because the service is disrupting the business model for those wages.

It worked well(ish) in 2019, it failed by 2022. It's not some kind of mystery around wages or inflation, the introduction of these services (and their popularity and growth, due to COVID closing in-person restaurants for a while) is the thing that killed the economics around delivery, for much of the US.

But it worked 20 years ago. That's the issue. We didn't get worse at driving and (apparently...) we didn't get poorer over the last few decades to pay for stuff.

Cost of living from the fallout of '08 simply skyrocketed and most of the country didn't not increase compensation to make up for that. Despite that company simply charged more while cutting costs at the same time. So the driver and the customer lost out.

I think by "these services" they mean apps like Doordash, not delivery as a concept

And they're saying: Why couldn't Doordash work when pizza delivery worked 20 years ago? Doordash is just pizza delivery scaled up, right? If pizza delivery had continued, it should work the same way as doordash for the same price as doordash but limited to pizza restaurants (by definition), right?

It is odd.. It's such an easy middlemen to apply and should theoretically be operated on modest margims. Instead it sounds like they for this stupid extortion of a cut behind the scenes which ruins it for everyon. Based on Cowto's operations, few would complain about a 14% uptick on delivery (and the tip was already culturally accepted. No more work to do there). Instead, you can double your meal price nowadays.

I know much of the answer is a mix of private equityb and an overload of debt taken from insane evaluations.

For a few reasons:

1. Pizza travels very very very well

2. Pizza is pretty cheap to make

3. Wages (and costs of transportation) were lower 20 years ago.

More generally, delivery as a model can work, but not when you have an organisation of really expensive engineers/salespeople working on a frontend to it.

DoorDash is just a means to extract revenue from users, contractors, and restaurants and give it to the owners of DoorDash. It's not a sustainable business and I'm not convinced it was ever intended to be. COVID was a fluke that made it hang around a lot longer than it otherwise would have.

Edit: ooo someone's mad I don't like DoorDash

The killer feature of doordash/ubereats/grubhub/whatever is the ability to shop for food from a ton of different restaurants in one place with one payment button.

Back when I was doing food delivery before the pandemic, we would actively promote placing orders with our restaurant directly. I would tell repeat doordash customers that they can save 15% if they just call or use the website.

None of them converted. The convenience of the app is just too strong for people to care.

The only time I've seen people care is if you lay out an identical order and show the percentage increase over ordering delivery through the restaurant, or picking it up yourself.

DoorDash adds upwards of a couple dollars to every item. They charge a 5-10% service fee depending on if you pay them monthly. The default tip options are pretty egregiously high - it's not uncommon to see double-digit tips in all three options. I once saw a $22 tip in the top option for a single bag of food with no drinks less than a 10 minute drive away but that's likely an outlier.

All in if you don't have DashPass you're easily looking at a 30-40% increase if you get cheaper items which are more likely to be marked up only $.5-1 but represent a larger percentage of the total.

Nobody in their right mind would tip a delivery driver 40% of their entire meal, why are you happy to give most of that to a corporation that is doing very little for the transactions?

Edit: I just did this for an example order for a nearby restaurant - 1 appetizer and 1 entree so probably good for two people not super hungry to share or one hungry person to eat.

$31.59 in food, $2 delivery fee and $5.50 in fees (I subtracted sales taxes manually). This restaurant is 5 miles away and it's 11:30 local time. Tip suggestions are $9.50 (30%), $11.50, and $13.50 (42%). So at the lowest suggested tip amount, which is offensively high, you're looking at $49 before sales tax.

The exact same order is $26.36 including an online order service fee but before sales tax. Even if you were going to get it delivered and tip the driver 30% you're still saving a ton of money and this is on one meal with enough food for 1-2 people.

The appetizer alone is $10 on their website and $14 on DoorDash. It's a crazy system and I can't believe how much money people burn on this every year.

The killer feature of this and like 90% of apps in this market capture model is laziness. They realize if you can make something easy for someone they will do it even if it’s not quite what they want.

Users want good fresh food delivered at a reasonable price. But they are willing to tolerate shitty cold food at an expensive price because it’s a tiny bit easier to do than picking up the phone.

We are lazy by nature to preserve energy and many many companies have just perfected finding the right ratio of how fucked we will allow our selves to be to tickle that lazy button.

Yes but having one payment button doesn't mean the service needs to manage its own delivery.

Consider the example of Amazon marketplace. You still have one payment button and you can still shop for things from different vendors. Yet the order fulfillment can be done by Amazon or the seller directly.

If such an arrangement is possible on Amazon, it must mean that there are shops that trust their own fulfillment more than they do Amazon's. It is entirely possible that some restaurants will want to own that delivery experience as well.

Yeah, but this convenience goes well beyond the "one payment button".

If you order food directly, you won't have the delivery tracking on the map. Even within the app, if the restaurant provides their own couriers, you lose the visibility and arrival ETA info.

And 15% might look impressive, but if you are getting your food from a delivery app, you probably don't care that much about food price in the first place.

Based on your description, consumers also get a wider range of delivery options.

Also, it is a little odd that people are dining out more often if the experience is worse.

But, yeah, wages and employment being down is the most relevant change.

Probably not the investors, but the Private Equity managers always win

There are plenty of other businesses wrecked by Private Equity but DoorDash isn't one of them. It's publicly traded.

The obvious solution should be people stop using it and the system collapses. I haven’t had food delivered since 2020. Sadly it seems most people feel it is good enough.

> They include some common appliances that use water, due to water use regulations. No reason my dishwasher should take over 2 hours to run

I don't think this is a great example, because saving water (and thus the energy needed to heat the water) is both a social good and a private good.

Your new dishwasher program might take longer because, for example, (a) it's more efficient to soak residues than keep blasting away at them, but it takes longer and (b) if you alternate between shooting water at the the top and bottom drawers (but not both at once) then you can get away with using half the water, in twice the time.

Most dishwashers have an 'express' programme that uses more water and energy to finish faster, so if that matters you can still have it. If it doesn't matter to you (e.g. because you're running the dishwasher overnight, or while you're at work), you and everyone else benefits from the greater efficiency.

So I think this is an unambiguous improvement. :)

The average quality of appliances is a separate question. Anecdotally, I finally had to replace a 22-year-old Neff dishwasher. I got a new Bosch one (same firm, different logo), and have been pleasantly surprised that the new model is still made in Germany, seems pretty solid, washes well, and is guaranteed for 5 years.

Not sure about price comparisons but what I can say is that many experiences feel worse. Paying 50-60$ for 3 tacos to be delivered, going out to basically any restaurant, pricing models on almost any subscription service(Adobe good example).

It’s led me to learn to DIY as much as possible, making my own fun and experiences so to say.

The price of a delivery is going to be proportional to the distance, not the cost of the food. The delivery is the same overhead whether it's three tacos or a five course gourmet dinner for eight people.

It really isn't these days. Ordering tacos down the street has the exact same extra costs as me ordering Burger King across town. Same "service fee", same delivery fee, driver isn't tipped more or less (just the expected % of your order).

Yet these companies add a few dollars to each item and then make shipping cheap - for presumably the same reasons Amazon does.

Eh, I technically pay 0 in delivery fees due to uber one or whatever but the fees somehow pile up anyways…the menu price of an item somehow doubles or triples I kid you not by the time I check out.

Why bother paying for tacos to be delivered when you can blend the soybean & canola oils yourself and stir in salt, msg, corn syrup, and food dyes yourself and drink it as an emulsified slurry that tastes the same as every restaurant?

> Am I totally wrong on this?

You are probably getting more, and the difference more than goes entirely into rent.

Real state is destroying the world's economy.

The money is going to the driver's rent.

Donald Trump made appliance water use regulations an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign. Of course his opponents mocked him for it, and it probably was a little silly, but the messaging was effective in getting voters fired up about government overreach.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-allies-call-tr...

AFAIK the reason that newer dishwashers (new more than a decade ago) take a 2 hour cycle is that it's a more efficient cycle in both energy and water, but not in time.