The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [116]
This last quality is what’s known as “perceived obsolescence.” In this case the item isn’t broken, nor is it really obsolete at all; we just perceive it as such. Some people call this “obsolescence of desirability” or “psychological obsolescence.” This is where taste and fashion come in to play. The ever-shifting hem lengths of women’s skirts and dresses; the chunky heels that are in fashion one season only to be replaced by skinny stilettos the next; the width of men’s ties; this year’s hot color for cell phones, iPods, toasters, blenders, couches, even kitchen cabinets: this is all perceived obsolescence at work. It’s not, as I say in The Story of Stuff video, that there’s a raging debate among podiatrists as to whether fat heels or skinny heels provide better orthopedic support. Those twenty-six distinct fashion seasons rushing in and out of stores, which I described in the previous chapter—that’s all part of the strategy of perceived obsolescence. Retailers and producers want you to believe that you can’t wear the same color or cut from one week to the next and that you’ll be less cool, less savvy, and less desirable if you do.
Now, not every lousy thing that industry has done was intentional and manipulative, but this one was. Corporate decision makers, industrial designers, economic planners, and advertising men actively, strategically promoted planned obsolescence as a way to keep the engine of the economy running. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers (one of my all time favorite reads), social critic Vance Packard documents the early debates about planned obsolescence in consumer products in the 1950s and 60s. While some individuals opposed the idea, worrying that it was unethical and jeopardized their professional credibility, others recognized it as a way to ensure never-ending markets for all the Stuff they designed, produced, and advertised—and they embraced it wholeheartedly. Packard cites Brooks Stevens, who shamelessly explained, “We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then the next year we deliberately introduce something else that will make those products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete... It isn’t organized waste. It’s a sound contribution to the American economy.”57
The strategy has worked beyond the wildest dreams of the people who instituted it. Planned obsolescence continues to dominate and define consumer culture today, and we dispose of (often perfectly good) products at an ever-increasing rate. In the service of perceived obsolescence in particular, there’s a whole industry hard at work spending billions of dollars each year to manipulate us into buying something new, better, different, and more “us.” That industry is known as... advertising.
2. Advertising
Advertising is like a constant background hum in our lives. The average American spends a total of one year of his/her life watching advertisements,58 while the regular American child sees 110 TV commercials a day.59 By the time she is twenty, the average American has been exposed to nearly a million advertising messages. According to the Center for a New American Dream, brand loyalties are established in children as early as age two, and by the time they get to school, they can identify literally hundreds of logos.60
While advertising has been with us for generations, its sophistication and scale have made it an entirely different animal than in its earliest days. In the beginning, advertisements were mainly used to announce goods in stock (“Just imported!” “Available now!”) and didn’t necessarily even name specific brands. By the time I was a kid, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, advertising had become a robust industry, but still nothing like it is today. Today, advertisers enlist psychologists, neuroscientists, even trendy consumers themselves to figure out how to best reach and influence more shoppers. Their main