People don't really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.

God damn do I feel that.

I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.

I'm a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.

And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn't really hard, just time-consuming)

I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there's a good chance the others weren't far behind)

For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.

And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.

So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics

So that's what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn't make financial sense to fix it.

This wasn't a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it's an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn't a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that's pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic "3 inch roller wheel" for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.

But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn't find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.

They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I'd have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.