What am I thinking? My wife and I bought a new house two years ago, but it was really more of a blank canvas than a finished painting. We've finally gotten in gear, getting the yard now mostly put together and putting non-beige paint on the walls. The next expedition is souping up the crappy kitchen cabinets and ditching our ten-year-old fridge.

Yeah, Sub-Zero, they make good fridges, right? We've looked at just about everything and we really do like the Sub-Zero. Then they quote you the prices. Yowza! And they quote you the same high prices everywhere, and they mandate sales regions, so you can't order from one of the big Internet discounters. You *must* buy locally. (The dealers always make a point of saying that if they offered you a discount, Sub-Zero could come by and strip them of their franchise.) Frakking anti-competitive behavior.

"List" on a 48" wide Sub-Zero fridge/freezer with stainless doors and an ice-maker/water-dispenser is a staggering $11,500 or thereabouts. The best price I've managed to get quoted, and I probably shouldn't say how so nobody gets in trouble, is still $9700.

It's pretty rough to stomach spending that kind of coin on a fridge. Any thoughts on this?

Check out this site http://www.refrigeratorpro.com/

Just in case you were under a different impression, Sub-Zero products do break down.

Most of the high end (high price) appliance manufacturers have MAP - Minimum Advertised Pricing rules for their vendors. Some of them are also pretty strong-armed about discounts, but this might cross the legal line in some states. If there were any proof that they colluded with competitors to maintain high prices across the board, I'm sure that would be illegal in every state.

Unfortunately as soon as you start looking into any brand that's built-in the price shoots up like crazy. Even with Bosch, who have prices otherwise in an acceptable range, when you look at their fridges, the prices sky-rocket.

Personally, unless I had money oozing out of my orifices, I wouldn't install a Sub-Zero. There's the lust factor yes, but given how much energy they consume, they're really not doing anything I can't live without. Form factor is generally the biggest appeal with their product range.

Are you also thinking of complimenting the fridge with a Wolf range? You'll find the same pricing practices there (same company).

ROFL...



Yes. You've been 'sold'. I'm sure they are great...

But so long as you're clear... that $10k buys you bragging rights and some nice kitchen-art.

Given you feel "It's pretty rough to stomach spending that kind of coin on a fridge" then I think you know that

FWIW we have a Samsung and love it. We sold a white one to the neighbours when we moved house and bought a new stainless one here 3 years ago. For the full stainless or mirrored version we're looking at about $1500-$2k. Note the missing 0.

You could then buy granite worktops ($3k) a range cooker ($3k) and still have some $ left over...

My brother got tired of this runaround, and ended up with what appears to be a double-wide built-in unit, but is actually a pair of fairly standard sized units - one freezer, one fridge - with all the usual bells and whistles.

Looks fine, even if it's not a Sub Zero built-in.

-jk

A quick check of Craigslist around me and I found several used but new looking Subzeros for $1000 or less.

When I got out of college I bought a 1964 GE that I still have, and it still looks good and works like new. I've always had good luck with GE stuff.

If it ever dies, I'll look into a used SubZ.

I'm guessing those are from "lease with an option to buy" people whose houses are getting foreclosed from under them and they're getting a little payback.

It may be. Most were already uninstalled. One guy had more than one. One was 9 years old with a compressor replaced 3 years ago, strange for this area since our power is very reliable.

There's a really cool sulfur dioxide fridge near me for sale that I really want and am scared to come within 100 feet of.

Once you buy into the form factor (48" wide, counter-depth deep, etc.), then you're already suckered in. I could almost certainly leverage connections and get a much better deal on a GE Monogram, but I've heard ample horror stories about GE's fridges (which aren't anywhere up to the standards of their otherwise excellent ovens and stoves).

At this point, I've opened up and stared at the inside layout of every fridge in this form factor, and a lot of them have stupid things wrong with them. The Sub-Zero, alone, seems to have been laid out in a useful way. One notable Sub-Zero feature is that the in-freezer ice-maker consumes less than half of the freezer space that's chewed up inside the GE Monogram. This kinds of quantifiable differences make me have to hope that there's a similar level of attention to detail in the mechanical bits. I'm probably deluding myself.

Anyway, my current best offer is on a version of the fridge that I want which has been installed for several months in a showroom, otherwise not doing anything. And even then, it's only modestly less money than my previous best quote for a new-in-box model.

All very sad, but I suppose there's a point of diminishing returns going on here. You're not going to find a brand new 911 Turbo for much less than list, and if you really want something like that on a budget, you head over to a Nissan dealer or something for a GT-R.

Grumble.

If you want an honest opinion, I think you're looking too deep into things. Ice maker that consumes half the space? Seriously? Is your life that monotonous?

Buy a $1k fridge and be done with it. It'll keep your shit cold and your life simple. Take your wife on a cruise to some exotic, poverty-ridden island with the other $9k.

Your soul will appreciate that much more than it would an extra 80 cubic inches in the freezer.

Maybe you are deluding yourself. No offense. /rant

I'm with Mojo on this one.

In the words of the Teacher:

"Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun."

I bought a new fridge/freezer not too long ago to replace a GE contractor special. (That is, the cheapest thing they could find that claimed to be a refrigerator.) The GE was just a piece of crap. The icemaker leaked, the freezer constantly had a slab of ice in the bottom of it, the icemaker would wear out the cam attached to the sensor bar within a year, etc. (That plus my experience with a GE dryer where the motor burned out in less than five years and a GE microwave that wouldn't heat anything straight out of the box means I'm never buying any GE anything ever again.)

Anyway, when I was searching for a new fridge/freezer, it became clear to me that there are only two design houses for consumer-grade fridges, one staffed with monkeys, the other staffed with chimps. Other than which of those design houses the "manufacturer" happened to choose, the only differences were in such vital aspects as shelf design.

To be clear, what I'm saying is that regardless of whether you buy a Frigidaire, a Whirlpool, a Kitchenaid, a Maytag, an Amana, a GE, a Jenn-Air, or a Hotpoint, you're getting the same refrigerator, and the only distinguishing features are aesthetic and support-related.

If you don't like those choices for whatever reason (such as, I don't know, the design sucks), your only option is to go to the high-end, and the prices there are outrageous. There is no middle ground. It's kinda ridiculous.

So I feel your pain. Well, I'd rather build my cabinets deeper than get a shallower fridge, but, in general, I get it. I find that there are a lot of product groups like that today. If you want a certain feature that shouldn't be overly pricey, you have to get it bundled with a dozen other features that you either don't care about or actively don't want, and end up paying a huge difference just to get that one feature, or go without that feature. In this case, considering the price difference, I'd go without the feature.

For the record, I got a Kenmore Elite french door model, which is apparently designed by LG, the chimp design house. I went with the Kenmore brand rather than the LG because the aesthetic was more American and less Korean.

Why do you need such a monster fridge? You can get a pretty decent "normal big" sized A+ energy rated fridge for around $1000:

http://www.johnlewis.com/230504911/Product.aspx

That one doesn't include a freezer. Or icemaker or filtered water dispenser.

Ahh, there are similar ones available but on re-reading it won't help anyway as it's the form factor he's after. Shoulda read it more closely before I replied.

There's a huge amount of waste in appliances, I know plenty of people who cook next to nothing at home but have an Aga or a huge 6 burner range because they like the look.

More interesting US/UK culture differences. Everyone in the US has what you seem to call over there "American foodstore" refrigerators. I've honestly hardly ever seen anything like what you linked to, and when I have, it's been a dedicated wine cooler or something similar. Do you not commonly freeze things at home in the UK, or do you keep separate appliances?

I think most people these days buy integrated fridge-freezers; mine is this one, or one very like it. The other common set-up (particularly for those who do a lot of freezing) is a "larder fridge" (non-freezer fridge) like the one in the other link (or a fridge with a very small freezer compartment, basically good only for ice cubes), plus a separate freezer, often a chest freezer. Chest freezers are very much "backing store" and might not even be in the kitchen: my parents kept theirs in the garage.

Side-by-side integrated fridge-freezers are AFAICT a more recent development, the concept, and often the actual appliances, having been imported from the US.

Peter

Our fridge is similar to the one I linked to except it's half fridge, half freezer, no water cooler or ice maker. Totally sufficient for our needs till we started rearing our own meat when we invested in a chest freezer (you can fit a whole Hereford and 2 lambs in ours).

How big a family do you need to make such a huge appliance worthwhile? Having said that in the new house we'll be going for a fridge like that in the linky plus a half height freezer, which I guess won't be far off the capacity? We'll be choosing our appliances mostly based on energy consumption.

My first thought is that there is untapped potential here and perhaps I should be in the mid-range refrigerator business. My second thought was that there probably isn't much of a market. That is, most people are not going to be willing to pay much over 1K for a refrigerator- their need is to keep something cold and they aren't going to overly fret over the details. Those who want more, well, generally they want top shelf and so top shelf caters to them. Those that want "more", but not necessarily "all" are going to be a much smaller demographic, probably for most products.

Of course this is just speculation on my part, but I figure that if there was a market there then there would be refrigerators at that price point.

My own tendency is to look for the cheapest thing I can afford, realize that it doesn't have everything I want, then once I find the really expensive thing that has the feature I want try desperately to justify the purchase (which in almost all cases is a bad choice). Sometimes good sense wins out, but often my lack of will power ends up in a poor purchase just because I want one specific feature. It feels frustrating to pay good money for something that isn't quite what I want, and somehow less frustrating to spend gobs of money to get more than what I want. And perhaps there are enough weak willed people like myself that it makes more sense for companies not to offer the mid range options to force them into the upper echelon.

All that being said, fortunately refrigerators are not a weak spot for me. As long as it keeps stuff cool, I'm in good shape.

For those of you who've said "get over it and get a cheaper fridge", that's certainly still on the table, but the space in our kitchen that was designed to "insert fridge here" was clearly sized for one of these 48" wide models. Anything else looks funny.

Curiously, the 48" wide Sub-Zero has roughly 30 cu. in. of interior volume. Our current chimp-engineered fridge has also about 30 cu. in. of interior volume, but that comes from depth, not width or height. Right now, the lack of usable freezer space is a very real problem for us, so improving on that is important. Also, our fridge tends to be packed solid all the time, so digging things out of the back is quite annoying. (Or worse, things get packed in and forgotten, then rediscovered months later. Gross.) The idea of having less depth seems like a very real usability improvement, even if it's also clearly a recipe for energy inefficiency.

Anyway, once you decide you've bought into the Sub-Zero form-factor, you look at all the fridges available, and at least our conclusion was that the Sub-Zero was the proper answer. You don't exactly save money by getting a Dacor or a Viking. As Jeff has noted, they're all catering to the same high end.

What's sad is that for almost everything else in the kitchen, there's something of a linear relationship between quality/features and cost. For ovens or dishwashers, for example, you can march up GE's price-list and the features get a little bit better with each step and the cost goes up a little bit as well. The $1000 dishwasher still bears a striking resemblance to the $300 model, except that it's radically quieter, has a stainless steel interior, has a built-in detergent dispenser, has crazy-adjustable racks, etc, etc. You don't feel like you're getting reamed on the cost. Fridges seem to be the exception to this rule. Very sad.

(Amusement: I found a Houston-local vendor on eBay selling used Sub-Zero gear, with meticulous photos of where they were dinged and so forth, and then you get down to the caveat that these fridges have no serial number on them and would likely not be serviced by Sub-Zero techs. Really? Sounds like they're stolen or something. Pass.)

FWIW, Kenmore is chimp++. Sears makes more than just aesthetic changes for the brand. In every case where we compared LG and Kenmore (for fridges, and washer/dryers) at the same price-point/feature set, the LG had much flimsier parts. Hinges, buttons, dials, etc. on the Kenmore versions were all much beefier, and felt like they could withstand more use.

When I was appliance shopping, most decent fridges were at least $1500. Anything remotely close to counter depth and with stainless fascia was over $2000. I'm talking $US.

It's possible to get all 5 major appliances for under $1500. I was happy to keep our purchases to just under $12000 Canadian in March of last year.

I've got a Fisher and Paykel dishwasher that I wouldn't give up for anything else at this point. It doesn't have a stainless steel interior (none of F&P's do). I think I ended up at $1500 Canadian for it. Stuff adds up.

Maybe you should instead be looking for a fridge that can hold more than a Rubik's cube.

From my observations, most people in the UK have either a full-height fridge-freezer with a freezer in the lower half, or a under-counter fridge and a separate freezer elsewhere.

I've just moved from an apartment which had an small under-counter fridge with a freezer compartment, and it was just about usable for one person. Mainly the freezer capacity was too small, eg. a bag of frozen chips would take up a third of the space!

edit: On the overall question of pricing - the brand reminds me of the Kirby vacuum cleaners. A quality product, perhaps not worth even half the retail price to most people (but lots are willing to pay what they want), but can be bought as-new cheap enough.

Err, make that cubic feet.

There is at least one mid-range alternative in the same 48" form factor, the GE Profile which is half the price. There are probably others. You could consider genuine commercial (restaurant) products that are probably half the price of the SubZero. Have you looked at Viking?

Genuine commercial gear is certainly intriguing, but then you don't get features like the ice cube maker, water in the door, and so forth. You just get a large box with wire-rack shelves. Viking, Thermador, and others offer product lines that are competitive with SubZero in every way (including insane prices).

The GE Profile 48" model appears to have a street price of around $5800, versus $9500 for the "equivalent" Sub-Zero, after steep discounting. That was on my list, early on, but it seems to have the chimp problem in spades. You look the thing over, and what you see is not all that different from the cheaper, junkier GE models. Kinda like looking in a Chevy Corvette and seeing the same crappy plastic buttons that you find in a Chevy Cobalt.

To be fair, you'll find the same crap components in a Cadillac.

There's no doubt that Sub-Zero (and Thermador, Viking, Ultraline, etc...) are way better than stuff from GE. It just that they're not necessarily as proportionally better as the price would indicate. But that's hardly anything new, for this or most other industries.

You might look at some Bosch products. You might have to get two units to make up the 48" width, but they have a number of different width built-in products.

FWIW, the only fridge I've seen that really set off my chimp antibodies was in a friend's house in the US. (I can't remember what make it was.) It was huge, at least by British standards, and probably fairly expensive, and had a filtered, chilled water outlet -- inside the door. So whenever you filled up a water jug or whatever, you had to stand there for ages with the door open, letting all the cold air out. Who designs something like that?

Peter

I'm glad to have contributed a lasting conceit to the important field of appliance criticism.