Posts Tagged → clothes washer
Dear Labor Day: Make Appliances Great Again, please
How sad that our national holidays have become more about appliance and mattress sales than about the original purpose of, say, President’s Day, or Labor Day. But if I were to set out to write an essay about labor, and what working and worker’s rights mean to me, I would die of boredom trying to write it long before I finish it, and long before anyone might stumble onto it while cruising the internet at 3AM, and stay on it til the end. No one would read it, and even if someone might, I would never write it.
So appliances it is on this Labor Day’s essay, and we begin by asking Dear Labor Day, please make appliances great again.
If America is going to have this huge orgy of heavily advertised consumerism around this national holiday, can we at least have appliances worthy of their hallowed, legendary names and high advertising costs?
One must ask, because planned obsolescence is no longer a sideways joke among a handful of Americans who got burned once; today, everyone I know hates modern appliances. Because modern appliances are craaaaaap. All of ’em.
Got yourself a fancy, expensive WOLF stovetop, do ya? Guess what? It has the same exact cheap crap under the hood that the BOSCH has, that all the other ranges have. A little blue cartridge, some same wiring, some aluminum tubes to carry the natural gas, and four or five little piezo starters that are interchangeable among all of the gas stovetop ranges for sale today. And when the WOLF components go bad is about the same time as the BOSCH components will go bad, because they are all the same components. Just the names and a little bit of visible construction is different among the various makers.
How do I know this? Because I have been the ubiquitous frustrated husband who vows “Oh no ya don’t!” when the expensive appliance stops working, because some small electronic gadget way in the back in it goes bad, and I am faced with the bad choices of either bringing in the technician to fix it at nearly the price of a new appliance, tossing it and buying a new one, or trying to fix it myself, while our entire home just about shuts down until the problem is solved.
And I have now fixed enough of these various types of appliances to know the deal, the score, the trap that we are all presently in.
Recently, I bought a new clothes washer that has zero bells and whistles, does not connect to an application on a phone, has no lid lock, no digital display, no buttons. Quite the opposite: It has some old fashioned dials, an aggressive agitator that will rip your arm off, and is made in America. Smaller than most, by any measure, it cost much more than the fanciest washers for sale.
But it also has a waiting list, because Americans are sick and tired of crappy washing machines that put more emphasis on “efficiency” than they do on just washing clothes. Real market demand is bringing back ye olde fashioned washer.
I don’t care about efficiency when it comes to washing my clothes. I just want my clothes to be real clean, and not take all afternoon to appear clean. No low-energy impeller, a high-energy-suck powerful motor spins the agitator, and creates real water turbulence. The new Speed Queen starts and finishes in about twenty minutes total, and if the clothes survive the ride, they are real clean. You may also end up with very clean rags. This Speed Queen model is marketed to farmers and loggers. Think about that.
We Americans used to buy appliances by name brand, because name brand once meant something real, something substantive. Different brands offered different quality levels, different warranties, different life expectancies. Not anymore. Those days are long gone, far over, and I believe Americans all know it. Everything is now made by cheap whores for cheap whores, and tarted up with fancy shiny things and bold name plaques that are not worth the oxygen molecules you will breathe heavily around them as they are being initially installed in your home.
All are made somewhere far away from where legendary American brands started, out of the same crap internals. All of it, every name brand, all is cheap junk whose cheap junkiness will become revealed to you moments after the warranty runs out.
The places that once employed labor forces of American men and women to make the original name brand models, back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, the 1970s, they are today deserted ghost towns. Elmira, New York, Utica, New York, half of Ohio, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, these places are overloaded with empty, crumbling brick buildings that once housed the original manufacturers of the famous name brands we so treasure today.
But today, most appliances are made in Won Hung Low, Long Duk Dong, and Chee Ho, China, and they are all crap.
I know that a lot of American husbands think like I do, are probably battle scarred like I am, and they would also happily spend double the price on whatever the appliance is, if they know it was made in America, by American workers, out of sturdy, reliable, long-lived American-made components, and will not require us to make an impossible choice of fix, toss, or replace while our whole home life stalls out in mid-air, waiting.
Can we please make appliances great again?
(Side note: Author-poet-farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry died the other day; he changed a lot of lives for the better. Gil Freedman, whose father built my home address in 1939, and whose bedroom was long inhabited by one of my daughters, died earlier this summer, from Parkinson’s Disease. Gil was an engineer, and also a conservationist and clean streams volunteer; a gentle person. Nicest guy you will ever meet pharmacist and SCUBA SAR volunteer Steve Markowitz died real young last week, of a cancer he only found out about in July. Folks, do not waste your limited days on anything but moving the ball down the field. Because the older I get, that you get, the shorter and shorter the field appears to get, and we are all running out of field to run down, I don’t care how young you think you are. Spread love, be kind, be good, make our shared planet a little bit better. Editor over and out)
Where is the Manual Override lever?
A friend of mine has a beautiful home filled up with high technology gadgets. Everything in the house is automated, including opening and closing toilet seats, lights, music, the kitchen wine rack, you name it; if it can be programmed to happen or turn on or off when a person enters or exits the room or uses the potty, he has it set.
First time I encountered this was at a party. It was funny and entertaining. I would experience something newfangled and robotic, comment on it, compliment my friend for his ingenuity, and then retreat to the pool deck or his living room to talk with a human being.
Then a year later he generously hosted me as a guest for a weekend as I ran for state senate, while he and his family were away. Every time I stepped into the kitchen, lights would turn on, the fridge would light up, or automatically open if I approached it, same with the coffee maker, etc. When the shower was turned on, music started.
No matter what I wanted to do, or needed to do, or possibly indicated a desire to do, the automated electronics tried to anticipate me and do it for me. Even the toilet paper dispenser was set to go, maybe not enough, but it tried to provide. Everything but the final act was done by the toilet paper dispenser, but then the guest room toilet also had a bidet feature, which if you are into that, can work wonders if set on “fire hose high.”
After that weekend, I swore I would try to avoid automation as much as possible the rest of my life. It unnerved me, because almost as frequently as the robotics were correct, they were then incorrect, and then annoying. Put another way, the first hour of that is Golly! amusing. The second hour is provocative, as the human mind tries to find ways to work around the now-annoying robots. After that, one becomes tired of the novelty, and a bit alarmed by all of the automated activity that occurs no matter which room one enters into, and what one really wants.
And there is no manual override.
Several years ago I made the mistake of buying a newfangled clothes washing machine. Our old one died, and I had run out of fixes for it. I could not find its two-way electric motor, used, even on eBay, and so it went out into the world of recycling.
Looking for that old machine’s fierce old-fashioned tear-your-arm-off churn of the washing machines we all grew up with, I accepted the salesman’s representation that this new machine could do that, if I programmed it to do it. And Lordy but does it have buttons for programming! It even can link up with your smart phone and be run from that, if you download that manufacturer’s spyware app.
I figured that with all of these sophisticated buttons and options, the machine could probably be programmed to write Shakespeare sonnets, much less really, really clean our family’s clothing.
Nope.
Turns out that the machine has programming for a high efficiency absence of cleaning water set at cold, and shame-on-you low efficiency absence of cleaning water, set at tepid, with the same weak, flaccid, slow, low-energy half-turn of the cleaning rotor as happens with the high-efficiency choice. And the churny-rotor thingy is a superior action to the lift-and-flop motion the machine is set to do from the factory.
Any mistake in trying to run a wash and then stopping it requires the machine to drain out all of the wash water and then start all over again. Which is a waste of water, and whatever electricity it used, and is usually an unnecessary step.
With this new, expensive, high tech clothes washing machine, you are stuck with a set of poor or poorer choices in how to maybe clean your clothes. The machine was designed and programmed by people who care more about energy and water efficiency than actually cleaning clothes.
Note to clothes washer manufacturers: We consumers buy clothes washers because we want our clothes to get clean, however that is done, whatever it takes, at whatever amounts and temperatures of water are needed, and with whatever rotor churn power is needed to knock the caked dirt off of my work clothes. We don’t want high efficiency water and electrictity use for anything other than thoroughly cleaning our clothes. And if the high efficiency settings don’t clean clothes, as they usually do not, then we want a choice in setting the machine to really kick ass and do what clothes washers are supposed to do: Clean. Really, really, super clean. At whatever cost in water and electricity.
And no, there is no manual override for this fancy washing machine. You the consumer are given an incomplete set of choices, and by golly, that is what you will learn to like, whether it is likable or not.
Last but not least among the examples of modern thingies needing a manual override, we have the new car belonging to the Princess of Patience. It is a 2026 Toyota Rav4 hybrid, being number four in a progression of RAV4s the Princess of Patience has owned and relied upon, with great enjoyment.
Heh, well, this latest and greatest iteration of the tried and true and much favored RAV4 inspires our gentle, soft spoken, always well considered Princess of Patience to say things like “I hate this %*$#@! thing. I want to set it on fire and leave it on the side of the road!”
Now, what could inspire such a harsh reaction to something so wonderfully modern and reliable as her new car? In a word: Technological automation.
This damned RAV4 has more technology than a fighter jet, and more automation than the Toyota car factory that built it. The technology is overwhelming, unnecessary, superfluous, and impossible to control, unless one has a degree in computer programming. The little turny knobs we used for the past seventy years for selecting radio stations and interior temperatures worked, ya know. Simple solution, hard to break, easy to tune. Not the new car technology! It is all touch screen, which is hard to see, inelegant, and clumsy.
This RAV4 tries to grab and pull into its computer motherboard every electronic gadget and phone that passes within fifty feet of it, then downloading and storing everything digital on said gadget and phone (to then download to Toyota so the car company can then sell and monetize our most personal information). This car also has every kind of Nanny pseudo-safety feature automatically built in that a weenie sheltered mama’s boy could ever dream up.
The car beeps and chimes and dings if you swerve one inch into the road dividing line. It will also automatically swerve away from any car or dividing line it believes you have mistakenly turned towards, even if you are swerving to avoid a deer standing in the middle of the road, but end up hitting the deer instead, because of the car’s automated correction system.
Ditto for coming anywhere near another vehicle while driving or parking. Last week my left wrist was nearly broken because of the force it hit the steering wheel with, as the car automatically and harshly jammed on the brakes to “save” us from hitting the rear end of a car that was turning into an alley in a congested urban area. We were plenty far enough away from the other car’s bumper, but to the RAV4, we nearly died, and it saved us.
Whoever programmed this car’s automated sensors and driving instructions obviously never drove in Brooklyn, New York, where urban combat driving is the norm and clearances between moving and parked vehicles and with buildings and humans are all measured in tenths of inches. To everyone’s satisfaction. But not to this car!
If I were to try to drive this 2026 RAV4 in a place like Brooklyn, I would leave a trail of destruction and mayhem behind me, on account of the automated driving and “safe reaction” nanny settings programmed into the car. The car would swerve to avoid one perceived obstacle, and then take out two grandmas, a stroller, and a partridge in a pear tree in one full swoop, just to stop me from maybe hitting something. All while the damned thing scans my eyeballs and my brain for what music I might possibly want to listen to at that second.
Folks, there is just too damned much technology and automation and useless gee-whiz gizmos in everything we use. It is all working against us, against our interests, our choices, against our humanity. It is a reflection not of us and our choices, but of the weak and highly risk-averse fairies who program these things before we start using them. And there is no manual override for any of it.
Not everything analog is bad, and hardly everything digital is good. The deeper we go into digital everything, the more we want some of that old analog world back. It was easier, more user friendly, did more with less, easier to maintain, lasted longer and broke a lot lot less than the digital crap.
You want a tamper resistant and theft-proof vehicle, that does what you tell it to do, when you want it? Get a manual stick shift. That is what I want in my next pickup truck, if only to be able to regularly give Third Gear to The Man.