Sasha Lantukh

How AI could force companies to compete on quality again

April 24, 2026

I recently tried to claim a warranty on a bin, and for the first time in my life found myself emailing back and forth with an AI about it. The reply was quick, polite, and completely unhelpful — asking for details I had already included in my original message. Not a great start.

Because bins, in my experience, aren’t supposed to require correspondence.

I’ve never really had to buy one before. Everywhere I’ve lived, there’s always been a bin already there — cheap, plastic, unremarkable, and seemingly indestructible. The kind of object that just exists, quietly doing its job for decades without ever demanding attention.

So when we got our own place, I decided to do the sensible adult thing and “invest” in a proper one. Something designed for modern life: neat compartments for recycling, just the right proportions, something that actually fits the space. I’ve always liked Joseph Joseph — clever, well thought-through products — and this felt like the sort of purchase you make once.

To be fair, there were already some mentions of lids failing a bit too early, but overall the reviews were strong enough to ignore that small doubt.

Three years later, the lid broke.

Annoying, but not catastrophic. I assumed they’d fixed it by now — it’s hardly an unsolvable problem. A sturdier hinge, a bit of protection from grime, and you’re done. Plenty of cheaper bins seem to manage it.

So I bought another one.

Six months later, the lid broke again.

At this point it stops feeling like bad luck and starts looking more like a system we all know about. Not a conspiracy, just a quiet optimisation. Because modern planned obsolescence isn’t about things falling apart instantly — it’s about them failing at exactly the point where dealing with it becomes your problem, not theirs.

You’re busy. You’ve lost the receipt. The email thread is buried somewhere. The process takes just enough effort that you think, “I’ll sort it later,” and later quietly disappears. Most companies will honour the warranty if you persist — they’re usually polite and reasonable — but they’re also counting on the fact that many people won’t.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

Sitting there, replying to one AI with the help of another, it struck me that this loophole has an expiry date. It’s not hard to imagine a near future where you don’t deal with any of this yourself. You just ask your assistant: “Check if this is under warranty and sort it.” It already has the receipt, the emails, the dates. It files the claim, follows up, pushes when needed, and one day a replacement simply arrives.

No friction. No forgetting. No abandoned intentions.

If that becomes normal, the quiet maths behind all this changes. More claims get made. More claims succeed. The gap companies rely on — between something breaking and you doing something about it — disappears.

At that point, they either make things that last… or they stop pretending they do.

There’s always the cynical option, of course. Shorten the warranty and carry on. At least it’d be honest.

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