The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [115]
But even so, producers of Stuff realized that there was an eventual limit to how much people could consume. At some point, everyone would have enough shoes and toasters and cars. At some point, there would be total saturation. And if the factories were going to keep churning out Stuff once consumers were Stuff saturated, then there’d be a glut. And a glut would be very bad for business indeed.
So the architects of the system came up with a strategy to keep consumers buying: planned obsolescence. Another name for planned obsolescence is “designed for the dump.” Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer who is widely credited with popularizing the term in the 1950s, defined it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”55
In planned obsolescence, products are intended to be thrown away as quickly as possible and then replaced. (That’s called “shortening the replacement cycle.”) Now, this is different from true technological obsolescence, in which some actual advance in technology renders the previous version obsolete—like telephones replacing the telegraph. The instances when new technology honestly surpasses the old are rarer than we’re led to believe. Today’s cell phones, for example, which have an average life span of only about a year, are pretty much never technologically obsolete when we throw them away and replace them with new ones. That’s planned obsolescence at work.
The idea of planned obsolescence gained currency in the 1920s and 30s as government and businesspeople realized that our industries were making more Stuff than people cared to, or could afford to, buy. In 1932, a real estate broker named Bernard London who wanted to play his part in stimulating the economy distributed his now infamous pamphlet called Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence. In it London argued for creating a government agency tasked with assigning death dates to specific consumer products, at which time consumers would be required to turn the Stuff in for replacements, even if they still worked fine. This system, London explained, would keep our factories humming along.56
Some obsolescence was planned to be not just soon but instant—with the advent of disposable goods. The first breakthroughs in this arena were diapers and sanitary pads, and it’s pretty obvious why these particular items caught on. But soon we were sold on disposable cooking pans that don’t need to be washed and disposable barbeques that don’t need to be lugged home from the park. Now we have disposable cameras, mops, rain ponchos, razors, dishes, cutlery, and toilet brushes (flushable, even!).
Then there are other things that aren’t advertised as disposable but are treated as such in practice. For instance, appliances and electronics break so routinely these days, and it’s become such a hassle to get these items repaired, and new ones are so cheap because of externalized costs, that we just replace them. “We’ll just get another one,” we sigh. I grew up with the same telephone, refrigerator, and kitchen clock, none of which were replaced by my mother for years and years until the fridge finally broke and she gave up the old rotary phone in order to get an answering machine when her kids all went off to college. (She still has the clock.)
Consumers are not just resigned to the practically disposable nature of this Stuff; we’ve come to accept it. In fact, we barely notice it anymore. That widespread social acceptance of ever quicker obsolescence is key to the success of the system. There were a number of things that had to happen in order for us to become so amenable to it. First, the cost of getting something repaired needs to be close to, or even greater than, the replacement cost, urging us to toss the broken one. Replacement parts and servicing need to be hard to access, which anyone who has called a customer service line recently can verify.