alt Hacker NewsThe moment manufacturers started making products that didn’t last long enough, with replacement parts expensive enough, and raising hourly rates for labour which made it cheaper to buy a new product rather than repair the old one. Also the new product tended to be more efficient with electricity and water or marketed as such.
My experience in the US is that you can take a broken item to a reputable shop and the guy will spend a minute or two messing with it and then he'll give you an on-the-spot estimate of repairability and price.
In Finland, the standard line is that they'll take your gizmo and put it in the repair queue - and then just to have someone in the back room so much as breathe on it - it's gonna cost ya 50, 80, a hundred.