Foreign Perspectives

The answer that many people would give is “just until the guarantee runs out” which used to be very much the case but fortunately things are built somewhat better these days.

Although we’re pretty hard on our washing machine, it’s actually lasted getting on for five years. In fact, that’s a whole lot longer than we expected as we made a point of buying the cheapest one available at the time on the basis that it was bound to break down after a couple of years with the amount of work we’d be putting its way.

Having said that, whilst you might think that buying a more expensive model is likely to get you one that’ll last longer in fact that’s not the case. The extra expense generally tends to pay for things like fancier knobs which have a tendency to break a lot easier than the very basic knobs that came on our cheapo model.

When you are looking for these things online, it’s best to forget about the default ordering that comes up which is usually by “popularity” which means that the big names come first. Better to search by price and take the cheapest. OK, chances are that you’ll never have heard of the make that comes top of that list but then you need to ask yourself if you want a really famous name on the washing machine or if you’d rather have one that you can brag about years later when you talk of how little it cost and how many years you’ve been using it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.