The people who can’t stop talking about vacuum cleaners

Let’s say you’ve got hardwood floors, no pets and $400 to spend on a vacuum to suck up dust bunnies. Or maybe your apartment has wall-to-wall carpet, you have two Bernese mountain dogs who shed like nobody’s business and an $800 budget. Whatever your specifications, there is a vacuum cleaner for you. And Chris Tam would be delighted to serve as matchmaker.

Tam is an active member of the Reddit community devoted to vacuum cleaners, one of the places on the internet where people can discuss and, let’s face it, fight about the household appliance. Cordless or corded? Bagless or bagged? Upright or canister? Which brands deserve the hype and which ones ought to be avoided at all cost? The online debate reveals intense passion for the vacuum — but also changes in business models, expectations of cleanliness and what we look for in a modern appliance.

“There’s something about vacuum cleaners that really gets people talking, gets people really fired up and just really into the detail,” says Gemma Joyce, the head of content marketing at Brandwatch, a company that analyzes social media and online data. “Looking at other common appliances like washers, dryers, dishwashers — you’re just not seeing the same level of engagement.”

Nearly half of Americans vacuum at least once a week, and 1 in 5 do so daily, according to a YouGov survey. “It’s also an appliance that you hold and you handle, like it’s directly contact,” Tam says. “I don’t pick up my laundry machine. I don’t have to move around my refrigerator. I mean, those are important devices, but I don’t have that same connection.”

For renters, vacuums are one of the key appliances that tend not to come with a property, so it’s an opportunity to personalize their space according to their needs. Joyce has her own theory about it. “People can’t afford potentially their own home, but they can afford a fancy vacuum cleaner,” she says. “That’s definitely something I did.”

The subreddit alone has more than 70,000 members, putting it in the top 3% of Reddit communities by size (likely with many more lurkers coming by when they’re in the market). Rules include “no price shaming” and “avoid condescension and elitism.” A recent post announced that “I need something that’ll suck the soul out of my vinyl and tile floors,” garnering more than 20 responses, including suggestions and tangential speculation about where Amazon-bought Miele vacuums were manufactured. Collectors show off their vintage Dirt Devils and Hoovers. Posters seek sage advice for their issues with charging, suction, faulty brush rolls and clogged pet hair. But the bread and butter of posts is people seeking help picking which one to buy.

For Tam, who works in the auto auction industry in Oceanside, California, helping people find the vacuum cleaner that meets all their specifications is “a little puzzle solving.” He estimates he spends about an hour a day on the subreddit.

Tam used to be interested in cars: “People knew me for talking about cars nonstop.” But now, he likes vacuums. “It’s a lot easier to collect vacuums than it is cars.” He currently has 19.

“I’m trying not to have too many,” he says. And it’s not like they simply sit on display. Many of them help him clean. Plus, different vacuums serve different functions. “Even if I didn’t try to collect … a good shop vac is good, a good carpet vac, something good with a hose, something small, something easy to go around, and that’s four or five right there.”

Among his favorite finds: a J.C. Penney-branded version of the iconic Hoover Constellation, which looks like the planet Saturn and hovers, which he scored for less than $200. For Tam, part of the fascination with vacuums is a respect for “these really neat machines. They instantly make your room, your area, cleaner and you feel good about that.”

Plus, floorcare sales overall have increased, per Joe Derochowski, home and home improvement industry adviser at market research firm Circana. In 2020, when the pandemic struck, floorcare saw a major boost in sales. “You’re just home more, and so you’re going to clean more,” he says. “And the bigger thing is that it changed our cleaning routine. We went for less whole-house, more spot cleaning.” Even though floorcare sales are down compared to 2020, the category “is still up versus pre-pandemic.”

And business is good for vacuum reviewers, too. More than a decade ago, Christopher White was running a cleaning business with his wife. He posted a video reviewing different vacuum cleaners he had used, comparing them and adding tidbits he found interesting. After a year, the video, which White describes as a “half-hearted” experiment, had amassed “a huge response,” he says.

The enthusiasm led White to found Vacuum Wars, a website devoted to rating vacuums (there’s a 100-point testing criteria) and sharing news about the appliance. (The site is successful enough to employ a staff of up to 10 and has more than 355,000 subscribers on YouTube.)

Sharks and Dysons often perform well on Vacuum Wars’s 100-point testing criteria. Boosting those brands, however, is controversial on the vacuum subreddit, as he well knows. “If you go on there and talk about how you like a Shark vacuum, oh boy, you better be prepared for heat,” he says.

A lot of the various debates, White thinks, boil down to a fight over changes in how vacuum cleaners are bought and sold. The better part of a century ago, there were vacuum salesmen who hawked their wares door-to-door. Then, the market moved to vacuum stores. Those stores would offer repairs over the lifetime of that product and had exclusivity deals with major brands like Miele, SEBO and Riccar. Those exclusivity deals went both ways; the vacuum companies, in turn, wouldn’t sell their products at big-box stores.

Then, Shark came onto the scene in 2007. “They offered extremely low-cost vacuums that did all of the things,” he says, and Dyson was alongside them. “They effectively did as good in most metrics as all those others that were being sold and it was a complete disaster for the whole industry … And so you could look at it as Shark and Dyson together essentially killed that industry or at least diminished it significantly.”

Now, the majority of vacuums — 68% — are purchased online, says Derochowski.

White is skeptical of the contention that Shark and Dyson aren’t as legitimate as the older brands, which he sees as “falling further and further behind every year and they’re just not as good anymore. It would be one thing if they were better vacuums in every aspect, but they’re just not,” he says, though he grants that “certainly there’s some that are better, and I want to also say I typically try to stay out of this debate.”

As far as White sees it, the hate for Shark and Dyson online on places like the vacuum subreddit come from “notoriously the old guard of these vacuum cleaner stores.” And a lot of the other debates about vacuum features are just stand-ins for brand loyalists to advocate for their favorites. For example, old school brands like Miele and SEBO tend to be bagged vacuums, whereas Sharks are bagless.

The biggest knock against the newer brands like Shark is the question of life span and repairability. Part of the allure of older manufacturers is the ease with which you can find replacement parts.

That’s the real reason, Tam says, why people on the subreddit so often boost Miele, SEBO and the like. (For what it’s worth, Tam is purely a hobbyist whose professional life is not related to the vacuum industry.)

To him, the old guard is simply anyone who “remembers that they shouldn’t break this quickly,” he says. “It makes me so sad — and it’s not particular to vacuums — that we’re in this disposable Bic lighter of electronics. You buy it, it breaks, you replace it,” he says. “It’s to the point that we get all these people asking in earnest, ‘Why do my vacuums keep breaking in a year or two?’”

Tam had once asked himself that very question. A half decade ago, his bagless vacuum broke. “It was already having problems, but the latch broke. All the dirt fell onto the floor,” he says. He remembered his childhood vacuums lasting much longer. So he bought a vintage Kirby.

“I was like, this is so cool. I can take it apart, I can repair it,” he says. Plus, it had more tools than Inspector Gadget: a turbo brush, a radiator brush, a shampooer, a buffer, a sander, even a head massager.

He knows that particular vacuum isn’t for everyone. And that’s OK. He — along with many other people online — can help you find one that is just right.