Household Appliance Industry

The global industry that manufactures home appliances, machines that assist household functions such as cooking, cleaning and food preservation, ranging from major equipment like refrigerators to small items such as toasters and electric kettles. Self contained electric and gas powered appliances emerged as an American innovation in the early twentieth century and expanded rapidly after the Second World War with dishwashers and clothes dryers becoming mainstream. The American appliance industry alone grew from about 1.5 billion dollars in annual shipments in the 1980s to 3.3 billion dollars by 1990, and by the 1990s had consolidated so that five companies, General Electric, Whirlpool, Electrolux, Maytag and Thermador, controlled over 90 percent of the dishwasher market; the industry is generally divided into major appliances (white goods), small appliances, and consumer electronics (brown goods).