Why does everyone think Kenmore is so great?

[j2400]

I posted about a Kenmore 500 a while back. Overall, I have had mixed feelings about it.

The good:
-Lint filtering was pretty good. I started using it after a Frigidaire (modern). Stuff that was always air dried was covered with lint and animal fur from my previous roommate's pets. One trip through the 500, and that lint was bye-bye, never to be seen again. At least, not seen until I cleaned the lint filter. In a word: Yuck!
-Wash action is most dramatic I've seen, with turbulent water, and good turnover.
-Reliability. The machine is about 40 years old, and still going. I was told that only one repair was needed since the early 1990s. Maybe since Day #1.

On the other hand, there are a couple of minus points:
-Slow spin. Clothes are wetter coming out than other machines.
-I'm not sure the neutral drain is the best idea. It seems like it's draining all the icky stuff that got removed from my clothes through the clothes, where that stuff can get reattached.

On the sentiment side, I grew up with older Kenmores. The sounds of a belt drive Kenmore take me down memory lane.

I, myself, like the styling of older machines better. I don't really like the 70s designs, some of which look cheaper (to me)than similar machines from earlier eras. Still, that's a matter of perception. I'd probably be happier with a boring/ugly/whatever belt drive than a current Whirlpool/Kenmore/GE/Frigidaire/etc.

 

[phamq]

I just have a couple Kenmore sets made in the 90s. Their designs are not that glamorous, you can find more of them in Craigslist than any other brand. They don't clean my socks as good as their Maytag counterparts. If I buy a new W/D sets, I'm more likely to shop at Brandsmart than Sears.

 

[70series]

Our Kenmore was a 99 DD 90 series, which had three speeds. Most of the time we used the middle speed as that was adequate for cottons, shirts and slacks. They came out very clean, even with the minimized agitation speed. Towels, bulky items jeans and drop cloths were washed in Heavy Duty. I liked the middle speed best on medium and normal loads; the turnover was fairly decent, and I found it less monotonous then the super fast speed.

As for BDs, they ROCK! Especially the late 60s early 70s models with gold str8 vanes. Those agitators were very aggressive, and accomplished the job.

Have a good one,
James

 

[danemodsandy]

I Always Felt...

...That Kenmore was much better at the top of the range than it was at the lower end. I remember the '65 BOL washer and dryer my mom had for about nine years - some mechanical problems, and you could not keep one of those plastic "bed of nails" lint filters unbroken for more than about nine milliseconds. OTOH, I had a '65 keyboard Lady K that was an absolute delight. And my grandmother bought herself a matched pair of 800s in '68. The washer lasted maybe 20 years, and the dryer is still in use. A set of '65 Lady Ks or a set of 800s are the only vintage laundry pairs I'd consider as drivers, other than Maytag centre-dial machines.

 

[mrcleanjeans]

Those Keyboard Kenmores are a real treat.

 

[strongenough78]

Gotta love the Kenmore family.....

It's funny how so many people can't stand them, but others just love them to death. I personally have never had a problem with torn clothes in a Direct Drive Kenmore product. Even my sister in law washes the big afghan blankets that she crochets herself in her direct drive Kenmore and have never had a problem. As much as I like the DA agitator with the faster wash stroke, I do miss the old school Kenmores and Whirlpools. Between my mom's 76 Whirlpool and my grandmothers 71 Lady Kenmore, I was a happy child when I did the laundry. I learned how to at a very young age. The Vari-Flex agitator in the 71 Lady always intrigued me. I always see people talking about the Roto Swirl, and Roto Flex, but not much about the Vari Flex. I never did actually see how it works. I didn't even know exactly what the feature was until I joined this site. And for those of you who have one, how about a short video demonstration! lol you'll be fulfilling a lifelong curiousity. The Lady K/Whirly's I grew up with lasted 25+ years. They cleaned great, had very few problems and were built like tanks. Although pretty much everything in that era was. The Super Surgilator agitator in my moms Whirly would get my fathers work jeans so clean, you would never believe he was a construction laborer. He would come home absolutely filthy, but went to work in clothes you wouldn't think were work clothes.
Probably the only thing I would have liked to see improved were the spin speeds. Kenmores are notorious for slow spin speeds. But they got the job done.

 

[whitekingd]

Frigilux!

Thank GOD I'm not the only one who alines the "K". Wheww Whee!

 

[jaxsunst]

As far as my parents were concerned, there was only one brand of appliances....Maytag. I always found them boring.

During my divorce in 1988, I sold my Monkey - Westinghouse set to my cousin. When I got back to where I needed a set my aunt gave me an early-mid 70's Harvest Gold MOL BD Set. I have been sold on Kenmore ever since. The washer had the straight vane agitator with the large UFO softner dispenser. They cleaned well, you can watch them without messing with the lid switch, and they sounded really cool. Kenmore is all I have had since. I had good luck with my MOL 1992 DD set, I'm still using the drier, it will not die. I replaced the washer with my Calypso, which I love. Do so space limitations I had to sell the DD washer.

 

[tomturbomatic]

I found belt drives boring and don't like neutral drains. The one thing I admire about Kenmore was that they continued offering the Combos into the early 70s. When those were dropped, it was the very sad end of an era. I know, better than most, their faults and shortcomings, but they were a bit of the exotic in a sea of sameness.

 

[danemodsandy]

The Bad Thing...

...About Kenmores, I've always thought, was that Sears completely abandoned their styling supremacy beginning around '80. All through the '60s and well up into the '70s, you could not find a higher-style machine than a Lady K, with the sole exception of the Maytag 906. But then, suddenly, the consoles got very cheap-looking, with silk-screening and Ye Olde Fayke Woode Graine replacing the die-cast delights you saw formerly. '80s BD Kennies are excellent machines mechanically, but they are not much to look at, and the superb model differentiation of earlier decades was lost - it became hard to tell different model series apart (something that has gotten even worse, BTW). I defy anyone who is not a washer maven to go into Sears now and pick out the TOL machines on the first try.

For my money, the genius of Sears in the '60s was that each model series had very strong visual differences, with each series saying, "If you'll spend a little more money, you can have me!" Excellent point-of-sale marketing - it was very easy to go into Sears determined to buy only what you needed, and end up with the Lady K, because each model series you looked at SO obviously offered more than the ones below it.

I well remember the '65 keyboard Lady K I had - solid, solid metal for everything you touched except the agitator. The lid for the dispenser looked like something off a '60s Lincoln Continental. Even the garage-door Lady K's of a few years later can't touch the first keyboard generation for looks and solid, satisfying feel.

 

[mrcleanjeans]

So very true about the not so greatys '80s with their genuine simulated wood grain,at least the black panel of the latter '70s was better than that,comparatively speaking.

 

[kenmoreguy64]

The black paneled machines, especially the Lady Ks, were victims of the times, not of Sears styling decisions.

Having a manufacturing background, it is all too easy for me to understand the debacle Sears must have had to wade through in the eventual decision to standardize the appearance of their machines. The bottom line was cost. Even back in the mid 70s, most everyone else had control panels that boasted a fair amount if not 100% parts commonality between models. It is grossly un-economical to make a custom control panel for a specific model. Sears did exactly that however en masse in the 1960s, but the competive market of later decades did not allow for that. Each time a new console is devised, every new part must get an engineering drawing, tested, molds or dies made, quality specs drawn, etc. Building the many variations that Sears did in say 1964 (with models from 1962, 63, 64 and early 65 all in production at once) the resulting complexity and variation between models must have been ridiculous to keep track of vs. 20 years later when everything going down the line had one of two control panel structures, either plastic or metal.

Gross profit margins on machines and entire product lines are measured to the penny. Save a dime per machine, when making 30,000 machines a week - that's a LOT of money per year, and Sears finally learned that. Evidence of the learning process with this can be seen in the standardized console structures of Maytag, GE and even Whirlpool (much sooner than Kenmore), and even in the U.S. automotive industry's products as they became 'cookie cutter' cars of the 1970s.

It's very true what was said above about the weight of some Lady Kenmore consoles. The 1972 Lady K machine weiged at least 25 pounds more than the rest of the line, all due to the keyboard controls. That's 25 pounds of mechanicals that weren't entirely necessary and cost a lot of money to manufacture.

I wish it wasn't true, but the reason for the loss of elegance is due to nothing more than cost.

 

[danemodsandy]

Gordon:

I'm completely in sympathy with the reasons for the changes in Sears' approach, but I think the old way was money well spent. Sears was supreme in those days, and now Kenmore is just another brand. It's my opinion that when they stopped spending the money to break out their model lines so distinctly, they stopped giving customers reasons to dig a little deeper when buying a new machine. If the BOL and TOL machines look very similar, customers can tell themselves that the extra money being asked for the TOL isn't really buying all that much. When Sears was really rocking and rolling, there was no way a consumer could do that - the difference was as plain as could be.

In my opinion, the very least manufacturers should be doing is to break out their TOL machines much more strongly than they are doing now, so as to dazzle customers with something obviously more wonderful than the rest of the line. If the rest of the line all has to look alike for cost reasons, so be it, but when a line looks the same from bottom to top, there just isn't enough reason to aspire to anything more than what one needs. Today's Kenmore Elite Oasis top-loader - roughly equivalent to the Lady K of old - is a very nice-looking machine. But it will not stop a Sears shopper in her tracks, the way the old keyboard Kennies would - it just looks too much like the other machines. To me, that translates into wasted sales opportunity, particularly aspirational sales, where the customer was dazzled by the TOL two years ago, and was saving and scheming ever since to get one.

 

[mixfinder]

Yuk

Poor people and white trash shopped at Sears. I know, we were white trash. I swore, with "God as my witness" I'd never own Kenmore, I'd be rich enough to afford Frigidaire Custom Imperial and Maytag. I always have and I appreciate God's witness, influence and delivery.