<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>newaccount74</author><text>The heating element of my Miele washing machine broke after about 4 years, and a genuine spare part would have cost 100€. I got a 3rd party replacement part that looks completely identical for 20€. I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure there&amp;#x27;s still a healthy profit margin on that, since they cost half of that on Ali Express. And if the original part breaks after 4 years, the aftermarket part can&amp;#x27;t be much worse.&lt;p&gt;The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking expensive is because they make a lot of money with service. They don&amp;#x27;t want people fixing their own machines for 20€, they want to have a Miele service person come and swap the part for 250€.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: And don&amp;#x27;t tell me that logistics for a heating element are hard. All Miele washers have been using the same heating element for 15 years or so, it&amp;#x27;s a drop in replacement for the previous version of the part, and it&amp;#x27;s probably also the single part that breaks most often. That part should be easy to stock and the cost to do so should be trivial.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is.&lt;p&gt;Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That&amp;#x27;s the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost.&lt;p&gt;None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It&amp;#x27;s an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.</text></item><item><author>swores</author><text>While I&amp;#x27;m not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices,&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.</text></item><item><author>adhesive_wombat</author><text>I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it&amp;#x27;s around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?&lt;p&gt;And don&amp;#x27;t get me started on cars!&lt;p&gt;If we as species cared about sustainability (we don&amp;#x27;t), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it&amp;#x27;s highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items</title><url>https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/not-dodgy-at-all-and-long-overdue-user-replaceable-batteries/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ksec</author><text>And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics works. Even distribution alone, within a single country ( ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is.&lt;p&gt;Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That&amp;#x27;s the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost.&lt;p&gt;None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It&amp;#x27;s an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.</text></item><item><author>swores</author><text>While I&amp;#x27;m not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices,&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.</text></item><item><author>adhesive_wombat</author><text>I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it&amp;#x27;s around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?&lt;p&gt;And don&amp;#x27;t get me started on cars!&lt;p&gt;If we as species cared about sustainability (we don&amp;#x27;t), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it&amp;#x27;s highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items</title><url>https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/not-dodgy-at-all-and-long-overdue-user-replaceable-batteries/</url></story>