"The most informative vacuum cleaner source on the net..."1 800 479 VACS (8227)
"The most informative vacuum cleaner source on the net..."The article is intended to express our opinion, as 29 year vacuum industry repair professionals, of Consumer Report's appliance testing. We do not claim to have any affiliation with them, nor with their rating system. Reporting on Consumer Reports' findings is a violation of copyright law, so we legally can't mention the details of their results. Though under our First Amendment rights as American's we feel we have the right to mention them by name in the following article.
The reason we are writing this article is because of the degree to which some of our customers have trusted Consumer Reports' findings, and our opinion of the validity of those findings. As we started looking towards other industries, we found many professionals to have similar concerns about the results of this consumer organization. Detroit News reported that the average number of survey cards filled in and sent back to Consumer Reports for one of the most popular categories(Automobiles) is 480,000, out of over 4 million sent. Given the fact that the majority of American families have at least two cars, this is a response rate of 6% in one of the most popular categories. When a response rate is that low, the personality profiles of the people who did fill out those cards should probably be taken into account.
When it comes to vacuums, to us, it seems like some of the top rated machines have been ones that our customers have found the most unreliable, easily clogged, and easily broken. We find that overall, time and time again, they do not compare with many machines that don't make it into Consumer Reports' testing. We also find a lot of professionals who agree when it comes to many of the other Consumer Report categories, they just don't add up. Every machine has both good and bad elements, our primary goal as a store is to match the right vacuum with the right person for the amount they want to spend, and the only way to do that is to know these machines inside and out. An unfortunate aspect of many of the appliance industries in this country is that they use planned obsoletion. The vast majority of the products found in big department stores are specially designed to break within a certain time window. In accordance, in that same period will be the discontinuing of the essential replacement parts, and the lowering of prices of the original product. After years of research, these companies have started to realize that by pushing the public towards buying cheaper appliances more frequently, they will make money. With today's technology products can be manufactured to last a very long time, and they don't need to be a small fortune either. There are vacuums below 200$ that will last an average of 10 years given they are taken care of properly. Planned obsoletion is a direct result of consumer support of the 'big box' mega stores. As competition between these large stores increases, so does the need to have lower prices. This is natural with all competition but when it comes to appliances, the end result is there is less room on the shelf for things that will last a long time because they don't move quickly enough. Strongly built, and innovative products are still being made and endorsed by industry professionals, but more and more they can only be bought on the net through specialty online shops such as this one.
A big push towards planned obsoletion in the vacuum cleaner industry is the current trend of bagless vacuums. For those of you who are in your 50's or older, you might remember the vacuum cleaner industry tried this about 30 years ago. Even back then when these machines were metal and much stronger people were still displeased. Any unbiased vacuum cleaner industry professional/technician will tell you that bagless vacuums are far inferior. They are advertised as less hassle because of the 'no bag', but instead you have an array of filters that need to be cleaned and replaced, which are actually more expensive then bags and provide a fraction of the filtration. These are not sealed vacuum units, and will kick the majority of the smaller particles/allergens either back into the air (ever sneeze while vacuuming with a bagless vacuum?), or they will go into the inner workings of the motor and lower the performance of the machine until it dies, usually about 2-3 years time. We would hope that a consumer organization who's self proclaimed mission is to "test, inform and protect" would be aware of this trend. There are well over 400 vacuum cleaner models available on the market in the United States at any given time, 1/3 which are some great machines (the ones carried by vacuum cleaner shops), yet consumer reports is only willing to test about 30-40 of the most poorly engineered machines, usually bagless. Our frustration is that these are the machines that you will only find in the big box stores like Target, Walmart, Home Depot, etc... You won't find them much in the smaller vacuum stores that would actually have to deal with the customer response to these poor products.
Consumer Reports does do some very useful tests when determining their results, but not enough to give you the whole scope of the product. Some of the factors we take into account when summing up our opinion of a vacuum cleaner is it's life expectancy, weight, storage ability, ease of push, animal hair removal, filtration, odor resistance, ability to clean carpets, bare floors and fringed rugs. Due to the length of their testing process they can not test for life expectancy, which is what we think most people look for in a vacuum. Also, the majority of these performance aspects in many of these low quality machines will change drastically after only a month or so of usage. Which gives the public a situation where the biggest appliance companies only have to make things work great out of the box, not for the extended periods of time that consumers hope to own their machine for. We believe a great vacuum cleaner, or any product for that matter should perform it's best for the majority of the lifetime of a product. We find very few vacuum cleaners on the consumer report list that do so.
Consumer Reports can be a great resource if you are shopping at one of the big box stores, but if you are looking in a vacuum cleaner specialty shop, trusting those same reports would likely be limiting your options unnecessarily.