This... I wonder why isn't there a market in Tijuana, Juarez and other border towns for fixing broken electronics and similar appliances.
replyHere in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.
In Western countries, the time of skilled repairmen is better spent repairing things which are much more important and expensive than consumer goods.
replyAnd a consumer usually has a much higher return from working in his specialized field to earn money and buy a new product, than spending time with difficult repairs of a broken product.
Yeah, this is entirely a function of labor costs. If you want your stuff repaired, ship it to a low-labor cost economy or hire someone to whom it’s worth the time.
replyJust to take one step further, labor costs are largely a function of local real estate costs.
reply> labor costs are largely a function of local real estate costs
replyDifficult to determine causality in that system. All we can say is places with expensive labour tend to have expensive real estate. (The confounding variable, I imagine, is immigration.)
To add to that; labour should be expensive. And lower repairability of consumer goods is a side effect that is worth dealing with for that benefit.
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