alt Hacker News> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.
This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.
The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.
I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.
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>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.
I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.
But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.
My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.
My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.
Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.
A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.