Root Cause Analysis: cheap plastic bit

We recently started having trouble with our 10 yr old fridge, it wasn't keeping the fridge side at the right temp. The repair man said $300+ to repair it. That led us to toying with getting a nice shiny new fridge. We looked and looked and looked, and couldn't quite line up the exact features we wanted.

So.... Suzy ordered a replacement part from Amazon ($50), and spent a chunk of this morning replacing the busted air diffuser.

Afterwards, the engineer in me had to dissect the broken part, and it looks like a tiny cheap flimsy scrap of plastic .




That cheap scrap of plastic in the middle of the photo was almost my justification for spending $2k on a nice new shiny fridge.