Electric appliances with deliberate weak points: wear is no accident

Printers, TVs, headphones, or washing machines, for example, are electronic devices which often fail a short time after the guarantee period has elapsed. For many consumers, this is a bitter reality, to which they have partly already become accustomed. Many devices can do their service much longer without the customer’s money bag or the environment having to be affected by mountains of garbage. This is at least the result of a long-term study of the Greens.


In the course of the past few years, the responsible persons had followed just under 2,000 references. According to several newspaper reports, they have come to the conclusion that manufacturers of numerous products would trickle. They are deliberately installing vulnerabilities in their devices so that the respective product breaks down faster. Specifically, for example, counters in the printer would sound an alarm after a certain number of prints, and the printer set its service without good reason.


Another example is electric toothbrushes. According to the report, manufacturers are usually to screw fixed batteries, which can not be changed. By means of inferior quality, companies would ensure that the device does not remain in use for a long time. For laptops, for example, manufacturers often stick components to make repairs more difficult and expensive. In the case of headphones connections are usually badly processed: cable break is the normal case - as can be read on saarbruecker-zeitung.de, for example.


As a result, the customer has to buy a new device and would thus be able to flush new, potential profits into the cash register. As the authors write, the artificial wear caused cost several billion euros a year. The Green politician Dorothea Steiner condemned such a strategy as "mess". A deliberately low life cycle causes immense garbage dumps. After all, it is usually more favorable to get a new device than the old one in repair. The Greens spokeswoman Nicole Maisch, responsible for consumer issues, is said to have demanded a rapid reform of the guarantee and guarantee right in the course of the current study results.