Home Appliances: Fast Fashion meets Planned Obsolescence

“What do you mean they don’t make the parts for the oven when it is older than 8 years old?”

“Well, at that point most people want to redecorate their kitchens and there is something better on the market.”

“You mean you are selling me an oven that will only last 6 years?”

“Yes. What card would you like to use?”

I had this naive idea that when I built a house I would be done. Here are the appliances I will live with until I die or leave this house 50 years from now. My parents renovated their house in 1985 and lived with the same stove, fridge, laundry, faucets, toilets, etc until they sold it 35 years later.

Planned obsolescence feels like bait and switch GDP driven insanity. We are renting huge complicated appliances for 6-15 years and then having to replace them. Throwing old ones away that need to be recycled or dumped or deal with - digging more raw materials out of the ground to build more.

This is insane and insulting.

Insane for our pocketbooks. Insane for our Mother Earth.

It is is also insulting - why are we being treated like children - the culture telling us we need to spent our time and energy redecorating our living spaces every 10 years when there are hungry and sad neighbors out there.

“Look children! Don’t try to fix/think about the suicide rates of police or homeless children or groundwater contamination or guns in schools or OR OR, here is a new faucet for you to get excited about!”

When I mentioned this to the appliance repair/salespeople/delivery people they all agreed with me. True, I can be a bit domineering when outraged, but I don’t think they were just being polite.

Nobody likes planned obsolescence - but we all participate in it. So I did some research into where this nefarious concept began.

I had heard the term around music players/radios/earbuds/cell phones/computers/AV equipment - but it wasn’t until I started digging that I realized lightbulbs have been the poster child of this notion for 100 years. As summarized beautifully by J.B. MacKinnon in The L.E.D Quandry: Why There’s no such thing as “Built to Last”:

The thousand-hour life span of the modern incandescent dates to 1924, when representatives from the world’s largest lighting companies—including such familiar names as Philips, Osram, and General Electric (which took over Shelby Electric circa 1912)—met in Switzerland to form Phoebus, arguably the first cartel with global reach. The bulbs’ life spans had by then increased to the point that they were causing what one senior member of the group described as a “mire” in sales turnover. And so, one of its priorities was to depress lamp life, to a thousand-hour standard. The effort is today considered one of the earliest examples of planned obsolescence at an industrial scale.

When the new bulbs started coming out, Phoebus members rationalized the shorter design life as an effort to establish a quality standard of brighter and more energy-efficient bulbs. But Markus Krajewski, a media-studies professor at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, who has researched Phoebus’s records, told me that the only significant technical innovation in the new bulbs was the precipitous drop in operating life. “It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales,” he said. “Economics, not physics.”

….

Giles Slade, in his book “Made to Break,” traces the term “planned obsolescence” to a 1932 pamphlet, circulated in New York, titled “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence.” The term gained currency in 1936, through a similarly themed essay in Printer’s Ink, “Outmoded Durability: If Merchandise Does Not Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed.”

This Depression-era argument, which one marketing writer of the era summed up as a “sound and genuine philosophy in free spending and wasting,” became the foundation of the modern consumer economy, so much so that we heard it again during the Great Recession, in 2007, when prominent political leaders suggested that shopping presented a solution to the crisis. The prospect of repetitive consumption is now built into almost everything we buy, and obsolescence has become, as Slade puts it, “a touchstone of the American consciousness.”

So here we are - those pioneering businessmen did what they needed to do and now we have a touchstone of the American consciousness: “the foundation of the modern consumer economy.” We pull up resources from the earth, put time and energy into those resources becoming a new thing to rent/purchase for a finite amount of time, at which point this thing needs to be recycled or reused (hopefully) and if not goes into a landfill to poison our groundwater. Lovely.

The worst part is that we don’t really have a choice.

Well, yes, of course I have a choice Corinna - I can cook my food on the wood stove and dig myself a permaculture refrigerator into the earth/over the pond.

Sigh.

What are we doing?