Cheaper than mending

For as long as I can remember, Thailand fixed things.

The shoe man on the corner. The fan repair place. The bloke who rewinds motors. The rice cooker shop, the umbrella man, the phone screen stall, the motorbike mechanic who can hear what’s wrong from twenty metres. Nothing was thrown away that could be persuaded to work.

That is usually described as a cultural trait — thrift, resourcefulness, something admirable about not being wasteful.

It isn’t. It’s a ratio, and the ratio has moved.

The ratio

Repair is viable when an hour of skilled labour costs less than the object is worth. That’s the whole mechanism. Every repair economy in history has run on it and every one has died when it inverted.

For decades Thailand had one of the best ratios anywhere. Skilled hands were inexpensive and manufactured goods were dear. In that world, fixing a fan is obviously correct, and a country full of people who can fix things is the natural result.

Both halves have now moved against repair, simultaneously.

Thai wages have risen — article 74 puts the 2026 minimum at ฿337–400 a day, and a skilled repairer commands well above that.

And manufactured goods have collapsed in price. Direct-from-China e-commerce, Shopee, Lazada, and since July 2024, Temu.

Why would anyone fix a ฿300 fan when a new one arrives in four days for ฿250?

They wouldn’t. They don’t. And the repair economy is not dying of cultural change or neglect. It is dying of arithmetic — arithmetic that changed for reasons which have nothing to do with Thailand.

What the numbers look like

In the first quarter of 2026, Thai factory closures (156) outnumbered new openings (139) for the first time in ten quarters. Nearly 2,000 factory closures were recorded across the preceding year, in a sector worth roughly a quarter of GDP.

The cited causes are consistent: weak competitiveness, high operating costs, difficult access to capital, and pressure from cheap imported goods.

Temu’s entry in July 2024 was followed by reports of a 10–20% drop in sales of local products by the end of that year.

And you can see the retail end of it in one building. MBK Center in Bangkok was once, essentially, an IT mall. After a shift toward wholesale, food and general retail from late 2021, the number of stores selling electronics and IT products and offering repair services has fallen substantially. The repair trade in Bangkok has consolidated into a few surviving hubs — Zeer Rangsit, Fortune Town — and thinned everywhere else.

The thing I refuse to write

There is a version of this article that treats cheap imports as straightforwardly bad, and I’m not writing it, because it isn’t true and the people it would be written against are the readers.

A ฿250 fan is a real benefit to a household earning ฿10,400 a month.

Article 74 established what the Thai minimum wage actually is. Article 13’s vendor nets ฿20,000. Article 38’s pensioner has ฿600 a month. For those households, goods getting cheaper is not an abstraction — it is the single most direct improvement in living standards available, and it has arrived without anyone having to legislate it.

The person whose repair shop is closing and the person buying the ฿250 fan are frequently the same person, making a rational decision in each role.

Anyone writing about this who doesn’t hold both halves is writing propaganda. The question isn’t whether cheap goods are good. It’s what you lose alongside the gain, and whether any of it was worth keeping.

What’s actually being lost

Not the shops. The knowledge.

A repair economy is a distributed store of practical skill — thousands of people who know how a thing is put together, what fails first, and what can be salvaged. None of that is written down anywhere. It lives in hands and it transfers by apprenticeship.

When the shops close, the knowledge doesn’t relocate. It stops.

And it takes a generation to rebuild if you ever want it back, which countries periodically discover they do.

Then there’s the other end. Article 91 described an estimated 1.5 million informal waste workers recovering most of Thailand’s recycled plastic, paid by weight, employed by nobody.

Repair and recycling are two ends of the same system. Everything that isn’t repaired arrives at the saleng sooner, and arrives as a whole broken object rather than as a replaced component.

One end is being loaded while the other is being defunded, and nobody is looking at both at once because they sit in different ministries.

The policy, which is both real and late

Two things are happening.

From 1 January 2026, Thailand’s Customs Department removed the de minimis exemption — all imports now face duty assessment regardless of value. A 10% duty on low-cost imports had been introduced from November 2025. Officials have since reported a roughly 20% drop in low-quality Chinese imports.

And there is a right-to-repair conversation. Research published in February 2025 argued that Thailand is unusually well placed for right-to-repair regulation, citing its consumer protection framework, potential government interest, and — crucially — an active repair market and tradition.

That last clause is the problem.

You can only legislate a right to repair while there are still people who can repair. Thailand’s qualification for the policy is precisely the asset the policy is late to protect, and it is depreciating — through shop closures, through repairers ageing out without apprentices, and through the documented barriers the sector already faces: restricted access to repair information, tools and parts, and products getting harder to open.

Thailand has a window in which right-to-repair legislation would protect an existing capability rather than attempt to recreate a lost one. I don’t know how wide that window is. I am fairly confident it is narrower than the legislative timetable, and article 76’s four-year institutional horizon does not encourage me.

What would actually help

Parts and manuals access. The single biggest documented barrier is that independent repairers can’t get information, tools or components. That is a regulatory fix rather than a subsidy.

Apprenticeship support. The knowledge transfers by working alongside someone. Funding that transfer is cheap and it is the only mechanism that works.

Count the sector. Nobody appears to know how many repair businesses Thailand has or how fast the number is falling. You cannot report a decline you haven’t measured, which means this article is describing a trend everyone can see and nobody has sized.

And don’t tax the fan. The de minimis change is a legitimate competitive measure. It also raises the price of the cheapest goods available to the poorest households, and that trade-off should be stated by whoever makes it rather than discovered by whoever pays it.

Common misconceptions

“Thais are naturally thrifty.” Thailand repaired things because skilled labour was cheap relative to goods. The behaviour follows the ratio, not the other way round.

“Cheap imports are simply bad.” They are the most direct real-terms income gain available to low-income households. The cost is elsewhere and it should be counted, not denied.

“Repair shops closed because of technology.” Products being harder to open is a genuine factor, alongside restricted access to parts and manuals. But the price ratio is the primary driver.

“Right to repair will fix it.” It would help, and it depends on there still being repairers. That’s the race.

“The factories closing are the same as the repair shops.” Different businesses, same underlying arithmetic — the price of a manufactured object has fallen faster than the cost of Thai labour.