I also blame consumers here. Are you willing to pay $100 for a better quality washing machine? Most people are not.

But even if I want to spend more, how will I know I am no spending more on inefficient stuff like a touchscreen on my fridge? Spending more money is sadly not equal to better quality, but I don't know what designates it.

In my experience, getting a couple of years old used premium item (which used to be like double the price) for the same price of a new consumer item is always a good idea for example for Notebooks.

Compared to new plastic consumer class crap, older premium dell notebooks have excellent usability, they last forever and you can even throw them around without worrying about their metal outer layer breaking.

The downside is that they might look ugly for some people.

Also most people I recommended this, dismissed the idea, because buying stuff used were somehow unthinkable for them?

I just don’t get it.

Buy industrial/commercial appliances. They're ugly as hell and last forever. Except... people want nice looking things.

This.

You would look at the warranty policies and guarantees. A 10 year warranty product is going to be better than one with a 3 year warranty.

There's a pretty good correlation between the two, let's not pretend otherwise.

Is there? How strong? Out of that $100 how much of extra weeks of usage will I get and with what confidence level?

Also - Is it affected by the level of hardness in the local water and my patterns of usage ajd types of detergent I use? Does additional reliability affect any other parameters like energy and water usage?

In a multi-variable comparison like this it is impossible to say much about future past 5 years with much certainty, while the price is single biggest objective metric.

I think we are, but the data isn't there. It's the lemon market.

I don't believe we would even know what we ate if there wasn't laws in place.

Well, in some ways it a rational choice by consumers: often times the newer product is does the job better, is quieter, using less resources.

Supposedly it's one of the reasons why homes (but not land) tend to depreciate in Japan: newer structures meet newer, higher safety standards. When you live in an active earthquake zone (also: typhoons), why wouldn't you want one that takes in account the seismic developments of the previous thirty years (generally how often rebuilds are done)?

It's all very well to say to it'd be nice for appliances to last longer, which isn't a 'wrong' statement, but looking at the efficiency gains over the last 20-30 years is quite remarkable.

We may now be hitting diminishing returns, so perhaps should turn to durability more, but it's not like buying new didn't get you anything in recent years.