Ep. 1834 - I Looked Into Why Household Appliance Quality Is Declining. It's Not What You Think.

**Matt Walsh** (0:00)
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Tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people. Well, it's almost Labor Day, which means you're about to be carpet bombed if you're not already with advertisements for new appliances, almost all of which are essentially ticking time bombs waiting to self-immolate in your home when you least expect it. And for that reason, The Holiday presents, I think a good opportunity to answer some questions that almost every American has asked in the past decade or so, which are when exactly did household appliances become so much worse, so much more dysfunctional and unreliable and even dangerous and what specifically changed in the appliances themselves? Is there any concrete answer to these questions? Are we all imagining the massive decline in quality? Well, as it turns out, no, it is not a figment of our imagination. Yes, the quality of our appliances, like so many other products in our lives, is declining. And there are very concrete reasons for that. It's not as simple as corporations want to make more money, so they design their products around planned obsolescence. That's part of it, but it's not the full story. There's also the fact that government regulations and the threat of litigation are forcing some of the largest appliance manufacturers to build major vulnerabilities into their products. And the manufacturers, rather than tell consumers what's happening and how to fix the issues, are happy to sit back and watch as the appliances break, leading to new sales. It's an intricate scam, and we're going to reveal it all so that you know what to look for.
But first, let's just watch this video together and set the stage. This is from an account called Techstuff, and it describes a Sunbeam branded toaster from the 1940s. So if my math is right, which it often isn't, we're talking about a toaster from more than 80 years ago. Now you would think, given all the advances in technology that have taken place since the 1940s, that today's toasters would be vastly superior to this product from Sunbeam. Again, it was created long before we landed on the moon.
And yet, despite all the time that's passed, modern toasters have nothing on the Sunbeam. And there's a very, very interesting reason for that that we'll talk about. Watch.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:00)
What makes this toaster cool is, well, besides the bread automatically rising and lowering when it's starting or finishing, it's actually the radiant control portion that makes it cool. And here, just let me read it for you. The toasting is always the same no matter what kind of bread you use. The heat radiated from the surface of the bread actuates the exclusive radiant control thermostat. That's why you always get the same uniform golden toast you want, whether the slices are moist or dry, cold or warm, thick or thin. Only the sunbeam has it. And you can clearly see they're pointing to the radiant control, which is essentially a bimetallic strip that when it gets hot enough, it actuates the thermostat, it clicks it off, and then the bread rises up. And that's all done mechanically. There's no motors in there that makes it go up and down. It's just a counterbalance on a lever.
So I'm gonna be making a lot of toast right now, and I'm gonna be using white bread, an English muffin, hamburger bun, some rye bread. Well, here you'll be able to see that all of the bread here is toasted at about the same doneness. And that's the really cool part about this toaster. And let me put all these times up against each other.
And as you can see, the times vary rather wildly. It goes from a almost two minutes at English muffin at a minute 55 and the hamburger bun at 42 seconds. And I didn't change any settings. It has the radiant control sensor and it keeps them all about the same level of doneness automatically. So by comparison, my Cuisinart toaster, which is rated at 1800 watts, you could see about how bright this gets with its heating elements. Now side by side, you can clearly see the sunbeam is really hot, and that's only at 1375 watts.