Why you should not buy all your appliances at once

[ZenGum]

Lamp ... lol ... but of course that's call-out fee and stuff.

A lot of these cases sound like failures of planned failure. Properly done planned failure means every component wears out at the same time.

Consider desk chairs. It makes no sense to put a gas lift strut that will last 20 years on a chair with crappy plastic wheels that will break after five. You want all your components to be just wearing out at about the same time. For a cheap chair that may be five years, but at least you'll save by not putting a twenty year gas strut on it. For a good chair you'll pay more for the wheels, but the whole unit lasts twenty years. Either can make sense, but mixing the two doesn't.

Toasters that must be replaced for want of a few more bucks on the control unit? Bad design.