The vast majority of people are perfectly okay with FOMO as a sales tactic. This includes self-respecting, loyal, repeat customers of quality brands. Conversely, very few people are spiteful enough to go through the trouble of switching to a competitor purely out of disdain for FOMO being used as a sales tactic.
A couple examples:
- The New York Times has 10 million paying subscribers for online content. A tremendous number. Many of their sales pages feature countdown timers and phrases like "Time is running out" and "Offer won't last."
- Pretty much any clothing brand. For example, rare Nike shoe drops. People are willing to spend hundreds of dollars, wake up at ridiculous hours, and stand in line for hours, for FOMO-driven clothing sales. And far from driving people away from the brand, doing this increases people's loyalty to the brand, because FOMO works on social proof.
I very much identify with the self respecting type your parent describes and try my best to 'punish' sellers who try silly FOMO tactics, by demoting them into oblivion in my books. However, I am still prone to some FOMO with proven, trusted brands.
Anecdote: Several years ago I happened to try out a certain brand of shoes and loved the quality and style and have ever since only bought that brand and have even introduced friends and family members to it. However, I still wait for their deals to show up before picking up a pair and am vulnerable to their "time running out" campaigns. I click "Buy", assured that at least I won't be stuck with a substandard product.
I like to think that if I ever build a product, I would focus on quality and attract the kind of customer I myself am and would never stoop to the lowly FOMO tactics, even for assured short term gains.
I used it for a few weeks without ever even trying to set up WiFi and everything was fine.
Then I found at that when you set up an LG washer for WiFi you can get reports in the app of water and energy use. I'd actually like that, so decided to give it WiFi access.
I then found out that the WM3400CW does in fact not have WiFi. I think it might be the only current LG washing machine that does not have WiFi.
I suspect that Consumer Reports got confused because it does have LG's "Smart Diagnosis" feature, which gives you diagnostic reports in the LG app.
The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically. Press the button sequence to start a diagnosis on the washing machine and it sounds very similar to an old analog modem. The app listens to that with your phone's microphone.