It stopped being the norm in small appliances first.

Did you know people used to actually take their toasters and coffee pots to a guy to fix them, rather than throwing them out and getting a new one? That was the norm up until about the time they started outsourcing to China, when they also started to make everything you need to get into an appliance proprietary (where you need a special Allen key instead of any old Philips, for instance).

People didn't bitch enough about that change, so guess what, it spread like cancer.

Kids like to talk about the "consumption" of the past, but we didn't use paper plates and plastic cutlery for every meal, and people actually fixed the shit they had.