I had a part-time job as cleaner when I was younger. We used Henry hoovers. They were used and sometimes abused 5 days a week... during the almost 3 years I was there, I think I only saw hoses and the floor head breaking.
So after going through a few hoovers at home from different brands, I bought a Henry for £100 3 years ago. The nose/hose detached after a few months. Not ideal, but I've fixed that in minutes with a bit of superglue. No other issues since then, no indications that it's about to fail.
I don't know if quality is still exactly the same as before, and they're certainly a bit heavier and noisier than some alternatives, but if you want something that lasts, get a Henry, not a Dyson.
Never understood the hype with Dyson. I suspect that like many successful hardware businesses, their story is mainly of brand strength, not of actual product quality.
If you pick up a Dyson vacuum you'll notice that it just feels flimsy in the hand. I think they're aggressively cost-engineered- the material you save by designing molded parts to be minimally thick has got to be like tens of cents to a couple dollars over the whole machine...
The brand is built on Dyson being a super genius inventor. He might be ingenious but he's applied to devices where it's not really needed and with unpalatable trade-offs.
In the UK at least his actions (offshoring, Brexit and tax) have probably significantly devalued the brand with a key part of his core demographic.
I'm nearly certain he believed/believes in the Britannia Unchained folks type nonsense. Brexit, then ECHR exit, deregulate like crazy and exploit everyone and their mum. So long as GDP goes up.
That's where the exploitation comes in. You cut every cost so that the cost is lower to make up for it. Cut taxes, employee salaries, social welfare, pension, environmental protections, legal protections, net profits go up.
After all more valueadd, and increased production is more important than the actual human beings this valueadd was originally intended to benefit.
Oh, it's even 'better' than that. To quote from an article in the Guardian:
It’s a short book but if you read it you’ll see that a decent editor could have got it down to one sentence. “When we seek to protect the vulnerable we limit the freedom of the rich and the privileged – and that is a disgrace.”
It’s a wretched read – a series of assertions and hunches freed from the chains of argument or evidence, with the intellectual rigour of a YouTube conspiracy rant. The prose occasionally soars to the level of clickbait, as in its most famous sentence: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Most of its authors are now cabinet ministers in a government that no one would call exactly Stakhanovite.
To be fair they're ex cabinet ministers. The current shambles are Labour and that book was written by Tories. But you're correct that they weren't exactly Pick of the Bunch Tories, Liz Truss in particular has the unenviable distinction of having been Prime Minister for such a short period that a lettuce famously outlasted her.
