On buying a new refrigerator

Last weekend was pretty irritating:  our main refrigerator died, after lingering with what seemed to be decreasing cooling for quite a while.  Turns out it wasn't just our terrible habit of loading up the thing with half used jars of pastes, pickles, jams and condiments of one type or another, only to throw them out a few years after their expiry date.   I'm not joking:  I found a large jar of home made, souped up soy sauce my wife had labelled in 2012!  Maybe refrigerated soy sauce with plums in it lasts for more than a decade, but I did have approval to throw it out.

Anyway, looking for a new refrigerator, I have realised that the general design of them seems to have gotten deeper as the years go on.   Already, the deceased fridge stuck out past the cabinetry it is beside; the new one is going to have 10 cm more protrusion.  (Maybe it will come down to 5 cm, as we have left about a 10cm gap between the back of the current one and the wall, as you are supposed to do.  I suspect that gap can be smaller without disaster, though.)

The other thing of interest is how many refrigerators come from China, and although they make some reasonable looking ones, I figure that these days, if you are buying any product for which you might want a spare part in even 5 or 10 years time, it feels a risk to be relying on having access to stuff from China in that period.  I mean, I still don't care if I have a Chinese built phone - no one expects spare parts for them - but cars and whitegoods - you don't throw them out and just get a new one lightly.    

Or is this why China might think it can invade Taiwan without long term consequence:  it makes 90 million refrigerators a year, although I don't know how many of those are exported.   "You can't keep your trade bans on us forever - you have millions of fridges needing spare parts, and people hate replacing fridges unless they really have to!"  

But I'll be OK - the one I intend buying was built in Vietnam.   

Don't say I didn't warn you.