Jeremy Horpedahl
In the summer of 2024, a passage from J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy gained widespread attention on social media platforms, including X/Twitter. Vance described his refrigerator from the 1980s, asserting that it preserved lettuce for weeks beyond the capabilities of contemporary models.
This was not just an offhanded comment by Vance, as he also said his takeaway from this anecdote is that “economics is fake.” By “fake,” he means that “we became less good at manufacturing in this country, too focused on low cost and not on durability.” While Vance’s comment was in the context of antitrust policy and consumer choice, we can also interpret this within Vance and Trump’s broader policy agenda, which views international trade as, in many cases, a net harm to the US—including, in this case, for consumers (not just the alleged loss of manufacturing jobs).
As we shall see, major appliances such as refrigerators have gotten both bigger and cheaper, though Vance would claim they are inferior in some other way (not preserving food as long).
It is certainly true that imports of major appliances now account for a significantly larger share of US consumption than they did in the early 1980s. A report from the US International Trade Commission in 1989 (see Table 3–13) shows that in the early 1980s, imports of major household appliances were less than 10 percent of sales (by both volume and value). This began to climb throughout the 1980s, and today, over half of large appliances (which include refrigerators) sold in the US are imported. As we will see, this period of increasing imports of refrigerators and other large appliances has been marked by higher affordability, larger sizes, and greater efficiency.
Affordability: A Dramatic Decline in Real Costs
A fundamental economic principle in assessing “value” is opportunity cost, the labor or resources forgone to acquire a good. Nostalgic accounts often overlook how prohibitively expensive appliances were, both in absolute and relative terms, during the 1980s.
Consider a premium Sears Kenmore side-by-side refrigerator-freezer from 1984, offering 25.7 cubic feet of capacity with in-door water and ice dispensers. Its list price was $1,359.99. Adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars, this equates to approximately $3,900. Yet inflation alone understates the burden; we must account for prevailing wages to gauge accessibility.
1984 Kenmore Refrigerator (maybe JD Vance’s), with a retail price of $1359.99 (image from 1984 Sears catalog, archived by https://christmas.musetechnical.com/)
In 1984, the average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers (representing about 80 percent of the private workforce) stood at roughly $8.32. Acquiring the Kenmore would thus require approximately 163 hours of labor, equivalent to more than three full workweeks.
By contrast, a comparable 2024 model from a major retailer like Home Depot—matching size and features—retailed for $998 in nominal terms in 2024, when I last checked it, a direct reduction without inflation adjustment. With average hourly earnings in 2024 at about $29.85 for the same worker category, the labor investment drops to around 33 hours. In relative terms, refrigerators have become nearly five times more affordable, reflecting efficiencies from global supply chains, automation, and competition.
Interestingly, that fridge has increased in price sharply since 2024, almost certainly in part because of trade policy, and is currently listed at $1,658—even so, it is still much cheaper when measured in time prices, requiring just 53 hours of labor, compared with 163 hours in 1984 (and you can probably find a Black Friday deal on it too).
2025 Whirlpool Refrigerator, with similar features to the 1984 Kenmore model, retails for $1,658 when not on sale (image from Whirlpool.com)
And while I made an apples-to-apples comparison of fridges in 1984 and 2024, today’s models are generally much bigger. According to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, the average fridge size in 1980 was 19.6 cubic feet, and it had grown over 30 percent to 25.8 cubic feet in 2021—the same size as I used in the comparison. Indeed, in the 1984 Sears catalog, the largest unit offered was 25.7 cubic feet. Today, you can find models that are over 30 cubic feet.
Energy Efficiency: Quantifiable Gains in Operating Costs
Beyond upfront costs, the total cost of ownership includes ongoing expenses, particularly energy use—a factor amplified by refrigerators’ constant operation. Here, the divergence between eras is stark, driven by regulatory standards and engineering innovations.
A typical 1984 Sears model consumed an estimated 1,415 kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually, according to the catalog listing. At the national average residential electricity rate of 8.2 cents per kWh that year, this translated to about $116 in yearly operating costs. Scaled to 2024 rates of approximately 17.6 cents per kWh, the same unit would cost $233—doubling the expense and straining modern budgets.
Contemporary refrigerators, however, have achieved marked efficiency improvements through advanced insulation, variable-speed compressors, and, to some extent, government regulations. A similar 2024 model uses roughly 647 kWh per year—less than half the energy of its predecessor. At current rates, annual costs fall to about $118, yielding savings of over $115 compared to running a vintage unit.
Appliance Longevity: Myth Versus Empirical Evidence
A common rebuttal to modernization critiques is that newer refrigerators fail prematurely, eroding long-term value. While individual experiences vary, aggregate data from the EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) challenge this narrative.
The 1990 RECS, the earliest with granular appliance age data, reported that 8.4% of households had a primary refrigerator over 20 years old, with 38.2% exceeding 10 years. By the 2020 RECS, these figures were 5.5% and 35.1%, respectively. These declines in longevity are much more modest than the anecdotes about old fridges in your grandparents’ garages. Hard data from the industry don’t go back to the 1980s, but when the New York Times talked to those who worked in the industry, many said things like “appliances made three or four decades ago lasted only 10 to 15 years [on average].” And, the Times grudgingly acknowledges, some of the small decline in longevity can be blamed on “federal regulations for water and energy efficiency for most frustrations with modern appliances,” which result in substituting cheaper parts. So, perhaps not all of the efficiency gains are driven by consumer demand, but they should still be considered in the overall calculation. And the substitution for cheaper parts could partially be due to another factor: tariffs. As tariffs on metals used in appliances make domestic parts more expensive, some manufacturers may switch to plastic components.
While the longevity of appliances hasn’t increased in recent decades, it has also not fallen dramatically, which is offset by the gains in affordability and efficiency. These three trends are summarized in Figure 1.
Reflections and Broader Implications
Vance’s anecdote may resonate with many Americans, but we need to examine the hard data before succumbing to economic nostalgia. Since 1984, median nominal wages have increased by about 250 percent, while quality-adjusted appliance prices have fallen, as shown in Figure 2.
The quality-adjusted appliance price index comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, though as we have seen earlier in this post, even without quality adjustments, appliances are cheaper in nominal terms. I can’t say whether the quality adjustment takes into account Vance’s claim that his fridge makes lettuce last longer, but given that lettuce and almost all other grocery items are more affordable than they were in the early 1980s, we can safely celebrate the fact that refrigerators are dramatically more affordable today.
When Americans think about their refrigerator and other appliances, they shouldn’t think, “Economics is fake.” Instead, they should recognize that this is one area of their consumption that has become more affordable, thanks to globalization and other competitive forces, whereas housing, healthcare, and education have become less affordable. And while those services are an important part of the typical household budget, the story of increasing affordability for refrigerators is in no way unique for goods produced under a free market economy. Despite claims of economic stagnation since the 1970s, Marian Tupy has shown that finished goods have become increasingly abundant relative to wages since 1971.
While the long-term trends in the affordability of finished goods are favorable for consumers, there is one recent factor pushing in the opposite direction: tariffs. For example, a paper published in the American Economic Review showed that the 2018 tariffs on washing machines increased prices by about 12 percent. And while Figure 2 above showed increasing affordability of appliance prices, if we zoom in on the most recent years, the trends have started shifting in the wrong direction again after the much broader 2025 tariffs were imposed. Figure 3 shows that, after rising in tandem with almost everything else during the pandemic, appliance prices began to fall in 2022 and continued to decline through 2024, but then reversed in 2025. While the increase since March 2025 (before the biggest tariff announcements) has been somewhat small, it would have been much larger if we had expected the pre-2025 trend to continue.