Why does everyone think Kenmore is so great?

[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.