Consumers are in favour of making repairs easier. In the 2020 special Eurobarometer on attitudes towards the impact of digitalisation on daily lives, almost 80 % of participants said that manufacturers should be required to make it easy to repair digital devices or replace their individual parts (see Figure 1). However, two-thirds of those said they supported this only if the cost of higher reparability was not passed on to consumers. A study done for the 2017 fitness check of EU consumer law showed that consumers were indeed ready to pay more for reparable products, but that this depended on how reparability information was presented. Consumers were more likely to choose products with better reparability when they were provided with information that spare parts would be available for a longer time. However, when the reparability of products was presented by providing information on the average cost of spare parts, the willingness to pay for reparability dropped for products with both high and low spare part costs. Moreover, information on the cost of spare parts seemed to push consumers towards cheaper products, even when they were informed that these products would have a shorter lifespan.
Conversely, the Commission’s above-mentioned behavioural study concluded that reparability was relatively less important for purchasing decisions compared with durability. The study also tried to quantify how much consumers were ready to pay for better reparability, which was presented as an A to G scale on an EU label. When they were shown just a reparability score, consumers were ready to pay more for better reparability, namely an additional €54.24 for a vacuum cleaner, €104.94 for a dishwasher, €170.58 for a TV, €97.70 for a smartphone, and €29.87 for a coat. When they were shown both reparability and durability information, the relative importance of each depended on the product.
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