Talk:brown goods

business, economic, financial, marketing terminology


 * I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say. —Ruakh TALK 20:56, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

From Requests for cleanup
I suspect senses 2 & 3 are complete nonsense (not worthy of rfv), but the term was completely unknown to me before I researched it tonight - so someone else needs to look.. - Versageek 03:09, 24 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Fixed. Also added white goods to complement it. SemperBlotto 06:53, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Are they equivalent? Why use "electronic" for one and "electric" for the other? DAVilla 22:12, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
 * This makes me feel as old as I am. I'm sure most of you know some or all of this, but let me explain for those who don't. White goods nowadays usually have electronic controls, but formerly did not. Their main use of electricity was and is to power an electric motor (washing machine; refrigerator) or heating element (electric range or oven; toaster). Brown goods, so called because they formerly were so bulky and expensive that they were generally used only in living rooms where they were supposed to look like furniture, used electricity principally to generate sound or picture, originally using vacuum tubes, which are also electronic devices (like transistors and integrated circuits). The carryover from the casing color is increasingly tenuous. One source defined a class of "gray goods" that included personal computers and telecommunications equipment (for homes and home offices only ?), but this may not be in wide use. I have included a quote that lays out the white goods/brown goods distinction almost definitionally, with the wood-/bakelite- casing as origin of "brown". DCDuring 14:38, 2 November 2007 (UTC)