Comment by kragen

Sometimes buying a longer-lived fridge for more money is still a bad bargain. If the short-lived fridge lives 20 years and the longer-lived one lives 100 years, the longer-lived one is a bad bargain if it costs twice as much, at any discount rate over about 3.34%. If it costs 4×, it's a bad bargain at any discount rate over 0.59%. At a 3% discount rate, the 4× fridge is a bad bargain even if you have to replace the short-lived fridge every 10 years.

However, probably the major cost of fridge failures is not replacement but the destruction of the fridge contents. A friend of mine recently lost their freezerful of food. Apparently after a power outage the freezer forgot whether it should be a freezer or a regular fridge and defaulted to "neither". This is an example of a "premium" feature making the freezer worse.