Convenience, Not Just Cost, Is the Top Barrier to Washing Machine Repair

For a shop owner tired of losing washing machine repair jobs to big-box replacement sales, a peer-reviewed study from late 2023 is worth keeping in the break room. Nataliia Roskladka, Anicia Jaegler, and Giovanni Miragliotta published "From 'right to repair' to 'willingness to repair'" in Journal of Cleaner Production, volume 432. They combined a systematic literature review with a Delphi survey of academic and industry experts to identify and rank consumer barriers to repair, using washing machines as their test case.

They identified 26 distinct barriers. Those barriers were sorted into three categories, and it was the categories, not the individual 26, that the Delphi panel ranked.

Top category: convenience of repair. Inside that bucket sits the cost of repair services, plus repair infrastructure density (how close is a qualified technician?) and scheduling friction. That's an important detail, because the paper is sometimes cited as if it proves cost is a minor issue. It doesn't. It shows cost is part of the single largest barrier, bundled with availability and access.

How the study actually breaks down

Roskladka and her coauthors built their barrier list from prior literature, then ran the Delphi process to weight them. The three categories they used:

Convenience of repair, which includes service cost, infrastructure density, scheduling, and the hassle of getting a unit to or from a repair point.

Technical possibility of repair, which covers spare parts availability, access to technical documentation, and the existence of qualified technicians.

Willingness to repair, which captures the consumer's own orientation: trust in the repair, attachment to the product, and perception of remaining useful life.

Convenience ranked highest. Technical possibility ranked next. Willingness trailed. That ordering matters because it tells a shop owner where the marginal customer is being lost.

What the ranking means on the phone

Three practical moves follow from taking the paper at face value.

First, compress the convenience gap. A customer who calls with a washer that won't spin is weighing "fix it this week" against "buy a new one at Home Depot today." Every friction point inside your booking, diagnostic, and parts-fetch flow is a tick toward replacement. Same-week availability and a clear all-in quote attack the top-ranked category directly.

Second, communicate cost inside the convenience story, not separately. The Roskladka paper's framing is that cost is one element of whether repair feels doable. A flat diagnostic fee, a parts-plus-labor range, and a one-year warranty on the repair turn a price number into a confidence signal. Shops that bury pricing until the truck is in the driveway lose to shops that publish ranges online.

Third, stock to beat the technical-possibility barrier. Bearings, drive belts, drain pumps, door switches, control boards for the top five washer models in your service area. Technical possibility ranked just below convenience in the Delphi. A same-day parts pull is the single cleanest way to move a job from "I'll think about it" to signed.

Extrapolating to California (our read, not the paper's)

The Roskladka study drew on European and international expert panels. It didn't look specifically at U.S. markets, and it didn't test California right-to-repair policy. Applying it here is extrapolation.

That said, the infrastructure-density finding lines up with what shop owners in the Inland Empire already know: a customer in a city with three independent appliance repair companies decides differently from a customer in a town with none. California's SB 244 and related bills target the technical-possibility barrier (parts and documentation access), which the paper ranks second. They do less to move the convenience category directly. Shops that want the full benefit of better parts access still have to solve their own scheduling and pricing transparency.

The paper's core message: the 26 barriers are real, the three categories matter in order, and the shop that shortens the convenience gap wins the repair ticket. That's the finding worth quoting in a legislative letter, a customer email, and the next morning's dispatch meeting.

For related coverage, see our reporting on California's right-to-repair law and the 2026 right-to-repair state-by-state update.