&gt; Interesting, I didn&#x27;t know that most appliance production happens in Poland.<p>From what I&#x27;ve read, their weight and bulkiness makes shipping from Asia to Europe costly, and this negates the potential gains from moving production to say China.<p>&gt; Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured &quot;in-house&quot; in the US years ago and how they function now, it&#x27;s night and day.<p>I think these two events have a common root cause - the corporations have been trying to squeeze more and more profits, esp. since the seventies, which resulted in both sending production abroad and amping up planned obsolescence. As a counterexample, Russian appliances from the USSR era were actually pretty solid, with a lot of them going on for 20-30 years without repairs. It wasn&#x27;t caused by rigorous manufacturing standards and QA (as the were both terrible&#x2F;borderline nonexistant), but by good, simple designs which had longetivity as a design goal.