Planned Obsolescence

I was pretty disgusted with this recent episode in my life. That episode involves a refrigerator....our refrigerator. A fridge has the task of stalling the spoilage of perishable food items. A bonus of consumer fridges is the attached freezer. This episode involved a slowly dying fridge portion and a fully functioning freezer portion.

The only real casualty was a 1/3 gallon of milk. L noticed items in the fridge not staying cool about 3 days before we got it fixed. Getting it fixed is what kind of annoyed me. I'm a cheapskate and was in no mood to call a "handy-man" or a suspect company to come in and try to persuade me to give them more money than I needed to. We went into research mode. Found the exploded diagram on the company site and tried all the troubleshooting listed. We vacuumed the condenser coils to rid them of dust. I had a bad feeling the motherboard. Yes, you read that right....My fridge has a friggin mother board on the back. This is nothing new. Most new fridges posses these items. Oh...the dumbing down of society...Anyway, We checked the part cost and it was about $220. I almost screamed. Age of the fridge? Just over 5years old. What a joke. Well....I got lucky with calling a local company since the part + shipping would probably have been the cost of someone coming out anyway. We had all of our food and other items out of the fridge and freezer into coolers to stall the spoilage. Oh...I forgot to mention that this happened on a Sunday. DOUBLE the labor PRICE!! Well, L found an add in the yellowbook that boasted of NO EXTRA CHARGE FOR WEEKENDS. Alright!! A possible winner. Well, I called them, the guy actually showed up earlier than first mentioned. He knew exactly what to look for and a manual defrosting of the freezer, motherboard replacement, $260 and several hours of cooling back down, the fridge was cooling and freezing like a freaking champ.

What happened to the days of having appliances for 20yrs and them still working fine?

planned obsolescence is alive and well.