On the other hand, if all toasters cost 50 bucks and lasted ten years, the poor wouldn't get that many toasters at all, would they? For someone with a low income, it actually works out better to buy a new cheap toaster every couple of years than an expensive one that lasts ten years. Particularly if you expand that to every other appliance and item he needs. Of course, you could always extend him ruinous credit, and that's a whole new subject...

The relationship between cost and quality isn't exactly linear, but it's there. Particularly if you have to make a lot of something. In most cases, you still get what you pay for.

My only experience designing a mechanical consumer product was engineering a fuser assembly for a 3M copy machine. I was new at it, and my inherent tendency to make things bulletproof resulted in an initial design that you could have backed a truck over, but would have doubled costs in materials alone. In something that you want to produce ten thousand of, that adds up.

Had everybody done the same with the other components of the system, it would have been priced right off the top of the market, and this when 3M was not exactly number one in the niche as it was. Telling a customer that ten years from now they would be happy they went with the Immortal Copier wouldn't much of a selling point, particularly for something that would be technically obsolete in half that time.

So I reworked things, developed a bit more skill in making less metal do better work in a casting, selected bearing materials that wouldn't last as long as complex ball bearings, but would be less likely to fail during their lifetime. Other things, too. End result was a fuser system that held up to the grueling testing procedures, but you probably couldn't back a truck over.

While I'm sure it's easier to believe that industries stay up late at bars trying to thing of newer and better ways to screw their customers, this isn't really the case, at least in my experience. Every design involves compromise. I've been fortunate to spend most of my design life in industries with exotic one-off production items and experimental prototypes, but I know what mass producers have to go through, and I don't envy them.

It's interesting to note that most copier companies have completely sidestepped all these things by making fusers and such "expendables."