Repair or replace

This subject has been coming up more often in conversations with my clients lately. "It is more cost effective to repair or replace"?

Usually items are replaced rather than repaired these days.

I remember many years ago walking through a small town, down mainstreet on a Sunday morning with my then 7 year old daughter. She kept commenting on "every store is closed" - "yep this is the way it used to be". And, a Mr. Fix-it, toasters, small appliances, she said "Why not just buy a new toaster?" Shoe repair?

The country has change quite a bit in the last 40 years with regards to "repair or replace".

Where do you draw the line?

when repairing is more expensive than replacing

This is one of my pet peeves, the fact that everything is designed to fail and be replaced. I've got a 50 year old room fan that works like a champ versus the modern ones designed to maybe last a few years.

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Originally Posted by tiggerfan

This is one of my pet peeves, the fact that everything is designed to fail and be replaced. I've got a 50 year old room fan that works like a champ versus the modern ones designed to maybe last a few years.

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LOL. I also have an old fan that works better then any fan that you could buy on the market today. I think it depends on the product. My girlfriend bought a digital camera and it stopped working. She called the manufacturer and they said it would cost 30 bucks to fix. Plus we would have to pay for shipping which was I believe 35 bucks. That's 65 bucks right there. Plus it was going to take 2 weeks to get it back. Now a day’s digital cameras are pretty cheap. I saw one at Best Buy on sale for 99.99 with a case and it was a better brand with more mega pixels. In this case we just went with the new camera.

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Originally Posted by tiggerfan

This is one of my pet peeves, the fact that everything is designed to fail and be replaced. I've got a 50 year old room fan that works like a champ versus the modern ones designed to maybe last a few years.

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Yeah, or you have something that works real well for many years, but then they STOP manufacturing replacement parts. :rant:

So then you are force to replace with an inferior product. :verymad:

Sad isn't it. But I do know people that still take their shoes to a cobbler to fix. That was nice to hear.

Didn't I read once where the makers of Nylons back when they first came out, made them so strong at first, that they were never falling apart? So they re-engineered them to fail?

I tend to run things into the ground before I replace them. I have a nasty toaster oven I've had for nearly 10 years that still works fine (it looks like hell however) but I'm not ready to replace it. Would I repair it? Probably not.

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Originally Posted by Evil Step-Mom

when repairing is more expensive than replacing

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Same here. I have a pair of shoes that were expensive and I love them so much I wore them almost all the time and ended up wearing holes in the soles after owning them for nearly 10 years. Did I get a new pair to replace them? As much as I would have loved that (I loooove shoe shopping), I took my shoes to a repair place and they put on new soles for me, thus giving me at least another 10 years with them (they're classic so they never go out of style).

Just today I found a hole in my nice, expensive, Vera Wang cardigan. Luckily it was on the seam, so even though I suck at sewing, I went ahead and managed to fix it instead of plunking down $$$ for a new sweater.

However, a few years ago, my old car started giving me a lot of trouble. Seemed like almost every month it was one thing or another and the repairs were getting into costing close to $1000 a pop or more. The car was 16 years old and was pretty much on its last legs. Got to the point where it would be cheaper int he long run to buy a new car. So that's what I did.