A Life Less Throwaway

MAKING IT UNFIXABLE – OBSOLESCENCE IN DISGUISE

One scorching August day in 2016, I invited my friend Tom Lawton over to look at toasters. Tom is a rather bizarre combination of engineer, inventor and TV presenter, and I set him the challenge of looking into how six different toaster brands were made and how that might affect their longevity.

‘What we’re looking for,’ Tom said, ‘is the weakest link. A product is only as good as its worst flaw.’

We looked at the toasters to get an insight into the choices that engineers have to make: the materials used, how a product is put together, and areas where the durability is being comprised. One of the things that immediately jumped out at us, though, was how hard these toasters were to get into. Some even had special star-shaped security screws. One did come apart eventually, exposing a jagged metal edge which cut Tom’s hand open. These toasters were clearly not designed to be taken apart.

Some manufacturers do this to protect themselves. If a member of the public fixes a product and it goes wrong, it can be a PR disaster for the brand, so you can see where this defensive thinking comes from. At the same time, being sold products that are designed to be unfixable (even by a trained engineer like Tom) has conditioned us to feel helpless when things break. So when their weakest link fails they are seen as ‘dead’ and destined for the big scrapheap in the sky (or sea … or slum).

Smartphones are perhaps the most notorious for this. Their weakest link is their battery, and the makers know it, but some of the brands make it impossible or prohibitively expensive for people to replace the battery. When it goes, often the whole phone goes. There’s been some backlash over this, but in general we’ve rolled over and accepted the situation. Perhaps seduced by having an excuse to buy the newest model?

But by preventing us from replacing the battery, the manufacturers are limiting the whole phone’s life to the life of the battery. Imagine your car tyres wearing out and the manufacturer telling you that you might as well buy a whole new car. This is essentially what many technology companies are doing right now.

Phones aren’t the only products that have come under fire recently either. A 2015 investigation into washing machines by Which? (the UK’s number one consumer magazine) showed their design had changed over time ‘and not for the better’. Now they’re made with the drum and bearings sealed inside, meaning that if the bearings go (one of the top five reasons for a breakdown), we have to replace the entire drum, which may cost around £200. If the machine’s out of warranty, we’ll generally be told it’s not worth fixing and we should buy a new one.7

When manufacturers were asked why they now sealed in their drums, they claimed it made the machines more reliable. However, the most reliable brand, Miele, doesn’t seal its drums, so this excuse feels as suspicious to me as finding a feather in my cat’s bed. It’s clear something nasty has happened …

WHAT TO DO?

The emotional and financial toll of having something break on you is often not thought about, but whenever a vital product breaks it brings an added level of stress into your life. It can even trap low-income families into a cycle of poverty, forcing them to pay out again and again for shoddy appliances. Some might say that it is the duty of businesspeople to put profits first; however, as I sit here writing this in 2017, I would argue that to put profits before people and planet is dangerous, short-sighted, selfish and just plain rude. Fortunately, as consumers, we do have some power if we know how to use it.

When they build it to break

• Get angry and demand more. According to a report on product durability, when it comes to small appliances, we’re upset if something lasts less than three years and satisfied if it lasts 7.7 years.8 I think we should expect better. If something has a simple function, like to boil water or toast bread, there’s no excuse for it not to last for decades. The fact that we’re happy with less is worrying – we’ve been trained to expect poor longevity.

• Look out for petitions to change the law in your country. France already has a law to prevent planned obsolescence, and a director of any company caught in ‘built to break’ tactics can now go to jail for two years and face a fine of up to €300,000 or 5 per cent of the company’s revenue. I believe this should be the law worldwide, and I’ll be fighting to make that happen.

When it breaks

• Let us at BuyMeOnce know. We’re aiming to build up the biggest database in the world on how long products last.

• Tell the company that you’re dissatisfied and write an online review telling others how long that product lasted for you.

• Support your local fixers who still have the skills to mend things. We need more of these people.

• Have a go at mending yourself. (See Appendix I: Care and Repair for advice.)

When buying

• Seek out products that are reviewed independently as lasting longer and those that come with the best warranties.

• Ask a local repairer which models they recommend.

• Buy locally whenever possible to avoid overseas factories with less rigorous standards.

• Vote for durability with your wallet by buying BuyMeOnce-approved products and we’ll soon see more companies upping their game.

• Ask how long a company keeps spare parts for and what the most common repair is, and consider buying that part in advance.

When they strip the quality

• Showing companies that you care about longevity is the key to getting it. Ask about it and talk about it on their social media. Be annoying! It’s often the best way to make change happen.

• Sign the BuyMeOnce pledge, letting companies know that you’d be willing to support them if they made products that were built to last. This will give them the confidence to change their policies.

• Look at independent reviews to see if the build quality has gone down. You can find these at Which?, Consumer Reports, the Reddit ‘Buyitforlife’ thread, BuyMeOnce and Amazon. Check the most up-to-date reviews for any evidence of fading quality. The good news is that people tend to be rather vocal when things don’t meet the standards they were expecting.

• Support innovative companies that want to do better. If you see a gap in the market, either consider filling it yourself, if you’re feeling inventive, or tell BuyMeOnce about it and we’ll put it out as a challenge.

• Support the makers and craftspeople who have a real connection to their products. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter help us because they allow engineers and makers to go straight to the customer without retailers or marketers in between. This means engineers who want to make longer-lasting products can offer them to the public, and if we like the idea, it may well get funded.

When they make their products unfixable

• Vote with your wallet and look for fixable modular versions of products. For example, a Fairphone can be taken apart and upgraded easily.

• If you have a product that needs fixing, visit your local Restart Project or Repair Café, or start your own group through online sites such as meetup or Facebook. If you haven’t repaired a product before, seek an expert’s advice first. Some products are perfectly repairable by a civilian; however, electricity is serious stuff, so do your homework and use parts approved by the manufacturer if possible. (For more on repairs, see Appendix I: Care and Repair.)

THE BUYMEONCE #MAKEITLAST CAMPAIGN

At BuyMeOnce we’re campaigning to get companies to tell us how long they expect their products to last and to make the best products possible. Products, rather like animals, evolve over time – features that are successful and useful, like a long neck in a giraffe or a long handle on a frying pan to stop burns, should get taken on by the next generation until the design is perfected.

But then money and trends come in and rather muck things up. Instead of making the ultimate frying pan, companies concentrate on making the cheapest frying pan. What we end up with is something that will serve as a pan for a few months but soon dies. Imagine if the giraffe got the same treatment …

A board meeting at Giraffe-makers, Inc.

‘Right,’ says the product developer. ‘So we’ve worked out that halving the length of neck will take costs down by 15 per cent per giraffe.’

The board members smile and nod to each other.

The head of engineering chimes in nervously, ‘But then … then it won’t be able to eat from the top branches during droughts.’

‘So?’ asks the CEO.

‘So it will starve in a year or so … as soon as the rains fail.’

The head of engineering winces.

‘Yeah, but, like … it’s still a giraffe until then, isn’t it? I mean, we can still advertise it as a giraffe, can’t we?’ The head of marketing lolls her head sardonically to one side and stares at him until he looks away.

‘And,’ points out the CEO, ‘if they fail earlier, people will just have to buy another one!’

‘And we could make them stripy,’ chimes in the designer. ‘Stripes are going to be huge next year.’

When shoppers were asked what their top motivation was for buying a product, price and style came out top. Longevity wasn’t even on the radar.9 This is partly because most manufacturers don’t want it to be on the radar. If they did, you could be sure that every box would shout about how long you could expect the product inside to last. This is exactly what we’re campaigning for at BuyMeOnce.

Imagine going to buy an appliance and having a clear idea of how long it would last. It would immediately be obvious which items were the best value over time. Please join us on this mission by signing the #makeitlast petition at change.org or reaching out to us at BuyMeOnce.com.

Clearly, planned obsolescence isn’t as simple as mysterious people in white coats putting mythical ‘kill chips’ in our blenders to stop them from working the day after the warranty expires. It’s subtler and more insidious. Still, I believe it can be overcome and we can drastically improve the quality of what we are sold if we employ some of the tactics above. The fightback begins here.

3

Psychological Obsolescence

or

Why no one wants their parents’ old settee

While rummaging through our rubbish, a group of academics found that of the household objects thrown away, on average 40 per cent were beyond repair and 20 per cent needed fixing, but a whopping 40 per cent were still perfectly functional.1 So we can’t blame all our waste on shoddy product design or irreparability. Something else is also at play here – psychological obsolescence – and it doesn’t play fair.

Psychological obsolescence is a technique used by companies to persuade us to replace the products we own, even if they still work perfectly well. Over the last few decades companies have conditioned us increasingly to see things as temporary and throwaway. They keep us obsessed with the new. They keep us excited, but it is a cheap, short-lived excitement, as the products we adore on purchase start to shift in our affections. This chapter explores the forces that set this in motion and what we can do to combat it.

THE MOTHER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE

Several men have been given the rather dubious honour of being titled ‘the father of planned obsolescence’, including King Gillette, inventor of the disposable razor, J. Gordon Lippincott, who praised the economic benefits of obsolescence in his book Design for Business, and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr, president of General Motors, who pioneered the idea of slightly updating the look of cars every year. Finally we have General Motors designer Harley J. Earl, who said in 1955, ‘Our job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934, the average car ownership span was five years; now it is two years. When it is one year, we will have the perfect score.’2

All these men played their part. However, planned obsolescence also has a mother, and she’s rather intriguing.

When Christine Frederick was born in 1883, her father apparently cried, ‘Horrors! Why, it’s only a girl!’ It wasn’t a promising start, but this girl grew up to be energetic, bright and imposing-looking, even in sepia. She gained a degree, and public power through her prolific writing and speaking, at a time when most women had neither. Sadly, she then used this rare female freedom to argue that a woman’s place was in the home … being a consumer.

Both Christine and her husband were in the advertising game. George Frederick was a busy boy, revolutionising the way advertisers wrote, promoting the use of psychology in ads and having several extra-marital affairs.

Christine meanwhile conducted scientific research in her own housekeeping facility – we have her to thank for all kitchen counters being the same height – and became a writer for The Ladies’ Home Journal, covering everything from economic and commercial theory to ‘Frankfurters as You Like Them’.

In 1928 her husband coined the phrase ‘progressive obsolescence’, and a year later Christine took on this idea wholeheartedly in her book, Selling Mrs. Consumer. It might just as easily have been called Selling Out Mrs. Consumer, for part of it was a guide on how companies could manipulate women’s insecurities, vanities and natural feelings of motherly or sexual love to persuade them to consume at an increased rate.

Christine’s main message was that the public should embrace ‘progressive obsolescence’, which involved developing:

‘(1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open; eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living.

(2) A readiness to “scrap” or lay aside an article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing.

(3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one’s income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living.’3

In short, she encouraged her readers to become highly suggestible people willing to spend above their means, upgrade regularly and throw away perfectly useful items – something she called ‘creative waste’.

She saw materials as ‘inexhaustible’, and so professed, ‘There isn’t the slightest reason why they should not be creatively “wasted”.’ She scoffed at the Europeans who ‘buy shoes, clothes, motor cars, etc., to last just as long as possible’:

‘That is their idea of buying wisely. You buy once and of very substantial, everlasting materials and you never buy again if you can help it. It is not uncommon for English women of certain circles to wear, on all formal occasions, the same evening gown for five or ten years. To us, this is unheard of and preposterous. If designers and weavers and inventors of rapid machinery make it possible to choose a new pattern of necktie or dress every few weeks, and there is human pleasure in wearing them, why be an old frump and cling to an old necktie or old dress until it wears through?’4

I suppose in Christine’s mind this brands me and anyone living a life less throwaway as a ‘preposterous old frump’. I wonder if we can get that put on a (lifetime-guaranteed) T-shirt?

THE THREE STAGES OF CREATIVE WASTE

Or, ‘Meet the Consumer Jones’s’

Christine describes how the three stages of creative waste work, using a radio as an example:

• Her perfect family, ‘the Consumer Jones’s’, start out by updating their radio set up to twice a year as it gets technically better. This is the ‘technical’ phase.

• Next is the ‘practical’ phase, where they throw out their radio and buy an integrated product such as a radio in a desk.

• Finally, they throw that out and buy a new product purely for how it looks. That is the ‘aesthetic’ phase.

What does this mean for us today and how should we act in these three phases?

The technical phase

Christine makes a valid point here in that we do need some people to be willing to take a chance on new technology so that it can progress. If a product is getting technically better, upgrading is a natural result. However, now we’re aware that resources are not, as Christine described them, ‘endlessly replenishable’, I feel we need to demand that tech companies do more in the technical phase. They should design products with upgradable or modular parts and products that can be dismantled, repurposed and recycled easily.

The practical phase

I take issue here with buying something purely to combine two objects, such as a desk with a radio. I think that complicating your furniture by embedding pieces of tech in it is a sure-fire way of forcing yourself to throw away your furniture! The more complicated you make an object, the more there is to go wrong with it. This phase, in my opinion, will cause more problems than it claims to solve.

The Aesthetic Phase

Getting people to discard perfectly working products because they were no longer seen as beautiful was the real masterstroke of psychological obsolescence. Manufacturers started to tweak the look of their products just enough every year to make purely useful things fashion items too. These products then became unfashionable within a few years.

This trend started in car design and then quickly moved into home design and appliances. A new model would come out and suddenly people’s pride in the old model was reduced. It was particularly noticeable in cars, as they were parked on the street, where all the neighbours could see them. The American car was soon considered to be a ‘kind of motorised magic carpet on which social egos could ascend’.5

The manufacturers would say that the public demanded these constant style changes, but in fact the public had been trained to expect them by the manufacturers themselves. As Charles Kettering, head of research at General Motors, famously wrote, his job was to make people dissatisfied with what they had already.

However, while all the other car manufacturers were tweaking the designs, one company bucked the trend. The VW Beetle looked exactly the same from 1949 to 1963. In fact, the company ran an advert celebrating the fact. Called the ‘VW Theory of Evolution’. It showed every identical-looking car with its year number, lined up in neat rows. Underneath was written:

‘Can you spot the Volkswagen with the fins? Or the one that’s bigger? Or smaller? Or the one with the fancy chrome work? You can’t? The reason you can’t see most of our evolutionary changes is because we’ve made them deep down inside the car. And that’s our theory: never change the VW for the sake of change, only to make it better. That’s what keeps our car ahead of its time. And never out of style.’6

As VW shows here, there is an alternative way for successful companies to behave if they choose to take it.

REASONS FOR WASTEFUL BUYING

Before the twentieth century, people didn’t naturally switch their possessions before they were worn out, so reasons had to be invented to get us to change things on a regular basis. To be fair to Christine Frederick, she did say that changes to products should not just be for change’s sake, but ‘for the sake of increased knowledge of taste, color, line, efficiency, better workmanship, health, hygiene and fitness’. Let’s pick these reasons apart.

Taste, colour and line

If a designer comes up with new colour schemes and shapes which the media proclaim to be ‘good taste’, is this a good reason to change what we have?

I would say it isn’t, as taste is in the eye of the taster. You simply can’t say someone has ‘better taste’ than someone else. That would be like saying someone’s preference for vanilla ice cream was better than someone else’s preference for strawberry.

Our preferences can change over time, of course, which is why it’s important to dig deeper into our true taste when we choose our products in the first place. More on this later, but for now, let’s carry on with Christine’s list of reasons to chuck out our stuff.

More efficiency

‘More efficiency’ is something to strive for, but unless the product in question is a vehicle, appliance or insulation, this isn’t a reason to jettison what we already have. Also, we’ve come to the point now where energy-efficiency improvements in appliances have plateaued, so unless your current model is very old or polluting, it’s always better environmentally and financially to hold on to the one you have. The carbon and money you’d save with the more efficient model would be wiped out by the energy and money needed for the new purchase. If you want to buy something new based on efficiency, wait for the great leaps forward that happen less often, such as moving to solar energy.

Better workmanship

Changing products regularly is a sure-fire way to undermine good workmanship, and sadly, workmanship standards have been proven to decline when we get into the habit of obsolescence. This is partly due to a decrease in the price and an increase in mass production and partly because there’s no point in putting proper craftsmanship into objects that will be thrown away in a couple of years.

Improved health and hygiene

This is a common marketing ploy for new household products. Companies have done a great job of convincing us that every cranny and surface in our homes is crawling with dangerous microbes. However, much of this fear-mongering is simply to sell us things. For example, washing your hands with normal soap and water is just as effective as the antibacterial soap sold at jumped-up prices.7

In the twenty-first century, we bleach and disinfect everything in sight, but just as we all have ‘good bacteria’ in our gut, we also need them on our skin for it to function properly. There is also evidence to suggest that our over-clean homes aren’t allowing our children’s immune systems to develop properly. Kids who grow up on farms and are subjected to the widest range of bacteria show significantly reduced levels of asthma.8

Nowadays kitchenware and bathroom accessories are often sold as being more hygienic, but as long as basic hygiene is used, such as washing your hands after using the bathroom and making sure that anything touching raw chicken is washed thoroughly, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get sick from the natural microbes that live in the house. Sterile isn’t something we should be aiming for. For a healthy life, cleanish is clean enough.

Medical innovation is to be encouraged; however, when it comes to health, while a couple of innovations such as car safety and less polluting cookers have had a big impact, I’d recommend turning a deaf ear to the health and fitness industry’s insistence that we need heaps of equipment, supplements and gadgets. We actually require very little to be healthy. Varied unprocessed food, clean water, clean air and a decent amount of activity. Done.

Better fitness

Here, I think Christine means a product that is more ‘fit for purpose’ or more ‘convenient’, and I acknowledge that we want innovations to make products better at what they do.

However, a huge amount of ‘innovation’ around convenience is also change for change’s sake, and much of the innovation overcomplicates products that worked wonderfully in their simplicity. I have an engineer friend for whom this is a personal gripe: ‘A toaster doesn’t need to be able to do your tax return, it just has to make bread warm and a bit brown on each side.’ But often companies will add extra elements to products to justify a higher price tag and to make their product seem new and different from previous models.