It says more that customers overwhelmingly prefer cheap products.
A 1962 washing machine was 184.95 [1] ($1523.97 today) and a 1959 model was $209.95 [2] ($1729.97 today); which are both more expensive than all but the highest end front loader currently at Best Buy. The vast majority of top loaders are in the $500-700 range, top loaders $800-1000. There simply isn't much market for $2000 machines that will last decades.
It's a similar story for almost all home appliances I've looked at.
> The vast majority of top loaders are in the $500-700 range, top loaders $800-1000. There simply isn't much market for $2000 machines that will last decades.
Those "high end" washing machines will also fail in the same time range that the low end ones will.
There is a market for them, but it will remain unfulfilled because the manufacturers make more money in the short term with the low-reliability ones.
Just recalculate the price of the built-to-last appliance from 1980 into 2018 dollars. For the same amount, you'll buy a very decently made device today, too.
By the same token, all the large CFL and LED lamps in my house are expensive high-CRI lamps. I've seen two CFLs go due to a failure in internal electronics, likely as a result of a power glitch. The longest-running CFL I had to date ran for 7 years, for 12+ hours a day.
> For the same amount, you'll buy a very decently made device today, too.
For most products I find this to simply not be the case anymore. What I find is the more you pay, the more "gizmos" and "features" you get that ultimately lead to earlier device failures than the cheap models.
And the same may be said about the products we make today 40 years from now. Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on the things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not.
Appliances back in the days could last decades. Now you're lucky if they don't break in a few years.
What do they say about the best type of customer? The best customer is a repeat customer :)