I know some companies offer 90-day returns etc, but what item would you think everyone would benefit from if it was an industry standard to have a test drive like new cars?
My nitpick would be microwaves. I have tried picking out what I thought was decent microwaves in the past but it’s hard to know exactly how it functions without using it. For instance, my microwave has an express button (30 seconds) or a minute plus button. You can only use one of them, if you’ve hit the minute button the express button doesn’t let you add 30 seconds while it’s active and vice versa. Also the beeping, even if you hit the stop button and open the door when it gets to 0 seconds, it still goes through it’s “I’m done” beeping which is loud and repetitive making you stop it at 1 second and still having to click cancel which makes noise. So what’s your choice?
HVAC systems.
When my wife and I we had to replace our forced air furnace and central air system in the late autumn due to carbon monoxide literally the evening before our son was to be born, I felt under pressure to get something in place.
I told them I needed a more powerful air conditioner for all the unique heat-generating equipment in my basement, especially since our old system had trouble keeping up. They said that the new unit was more than enough for the square footage. I reiterated again, that air conditioners don’t cool square footage, they cool BTU’s, and the average home doesn’t have a grow op and server farm in the basement generating significant heat. Then, they decided to hit me with the old “I’ve been doing this for {x} decades” speech.
Needless to say, I’ve had to consolidate servers, stop indoor gardening, replace the bulbs in the house with those shitty blue-hued LED’s that can’t dim right (and dimmer switches to handle the change in load characteristics), take the weather into account when cooking indoors and clean both sets of A/C coils on a more frequent basis. The air conditioner still can’t keep up and when we have a string of hot days, we can’t always count on the cooler evenings to get the house back down to “room temperature”.
Oh, and now our old chimney drips water into the basement.
Most comments have covered the biggest ones, but I’m going with a toaster. I have bought some really fancy toasters that can’t consistently toast a slice or bread or bagel and burn the edges and I’ve have some non-name junk tier that do great. It really seems like this should be a solved problem at this point, but nope.
The youtuber Technology Connections did an episode about toasters and how much better they were in the past. Retro toasters are apparently the way to go.
My GF did extensive research before buying our new toaster because almost every single one seems to suck. She finally got an expensive one from SMEG. Nice name. How hard is it to make a toaster that doesn’t suck? They’re SO simple.