It occurred to me recently that, at least in the US, the poorest households do not have dishwashers, and to this day consider them to be a luxury.
The same cannot be said for washing machines. Everybody uses a washing machine. If you don't have one, you use a laundromat. Even the poorest do not wash their clothes by hand with a tub and washboard like the olden days.
This comment has no real "point." I just wanted to share what I think is an interesting observation on this topic.
We have a dishwasher but rarely use it (only for parties, etc). Loading / unloading is surpringly time-consuming, imho washing by hand is quicker.
Something I'd consider doing if I was single would be to have two smaller dishwashers, and alternate them, and leave the clean ones in the dishwasher...
I've looked into this and they do actually make these. Same size as a normal dishwasher, but has two separate compartments of half the size. I wanna just skip the whole process and have my cabinets clean them though.
It probably depends on the size of the household as well as the food prep habits. In a dense urban landscape without much kitchen, a dishwasher makes less sense, given the amount of eating out, takeaway, and so on, probably decreasing the amount of dishes you have total as well.
> at least in the US, the poorest households do not have dishwashers
Not just the poorest. About half of the places I've lived in the US didn't have a dishwasher, and only about 1/4 of those places were affordable for a low-income person.
In my experience, it largely depends on how recently the place was built/remodeled.
I lived until last month without a dishwasher (as a NYC resident). It never seemed like that big of a deal. When moving, our only hard requirement for the new place was in-unit laundry.
My parents had a dishwasher but always said it "didn't get the dishes clean" and used it as a drying rack instead.
I bought a house where the dishwasher was incorrectly installed causing odors to come through the sink. That led me down a rabbit hole of proper dishwasher installation, maintenance, loading and using rinse aid.
MY GOD! My parents were wasting their lives! My dishwasher cleans and dries two sinks worth with three minutes of effort!
And various economists (and others) have suggested that the invention of the washing machine was the most important step towards allowing women to enter the workforce.
>The washing machine labour could have been solved with centralising washing as a society, in the same way we centralised childcaring.
Are you genuinely unaware of the laundry sweatshops in the early 1900s? Have you never even seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
We've done centralized laundry. It was sweatshop work and was pretty terrible for everyone involved. Today we have laundry pickup services, but it's too expensive for most people. Are you willing to pay $40 for a load of laundry? Because that's what you get without sweatshop labor.
Seriously, read up on early 1900s labor practices. The labor laws we have today are written in blood. A lot of women and children suffered gruesome deaths and disfigurement, lifelong illnesses and disabilities.
Spare us the conspiracy theories. Washing machines were invented because they're convenient, not because of "political propaganda". And we've already "centralized" clothes washing, it's called a laundromat.
Never let a mention of the hard problem of manipulating nonrigid objects go pass without mentioning how antiscience senator Tom Colburn openly mocked the idea of a robot that could fold laundry.
Now for the folding!