If you’ve ever owned a piece of electronics, then you know what planned obsolescence is. It’s a diabolical plot where the latest and greatest will soon become obsolete.
You know the drill. You buy the iPad 2 and the 3 comes out. Buy the iPad 3 and the 3.5 comes out with new gizmos.
If you’re a music lover, you definitely know how planned obsolescence works. We went from LPs and 45s to cassettes, CDs, flash drives and now the cloud. I still have a CD player in my car, though I’m not sure why. Well, I guess I do. The car is a 2004, a year when CDs were still the bomb. The iPod was only three years old and no one had figured out that all you had to do was put an audio jack in the dash to enjoy thousands of your favorite songs, not the same 40 the local station plays over and over.
If you thought that this was all about innovation, you’re wrong. It’s about sales and keeping the economy chugging right along. There’s an old story that went like this. Gillette admits they can make a razor that will last forever. It would cost about $40 retail for that razor. As you can imagine, demand would be huge. But once everyone had a razor, the company would go out of business. Razors that go dull ensure a steady supply of customers and the need to keep factories going which keeps your friends, neighbors and perhaps even you, employed.
If you want to blame someone for this idea, start with Bernard London. He wrote a pamphlet called “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence.” It put forth the model that consumer articles should become obsolete to stimulate consumption. You can, of course, also blame Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer who suggested that marketers and advertisers could instill the desire in consumers to own the newest, the biggest and the best sooner than necessary through their campaigns.
This not only gave birth to a whole new style of marketing and advertising, encouraging you to buy something you don’t really need, but also created an entire manufacturing culture that made it increasingly difficult to repair products. The cost of repair became greater than the cost of replacement. Batteries were soldered into place rather than removable. Tubes gave way to complex circuitry. Cases were made increasingly difficult to open.
It occurred to me recently that planned obsolescence is hardly a new concept. I think we were all born with it in us. After all, our cases are pretty hard to open, our parts aren’t easy to replace and new models are coming on the market every day, new and improved versions of us, thanks to evolution.
As a product, I’m ancient. I don’t have anything in my house that is over 50 years old except me. Not clothing, not electronics, nothing at all, except perhaps a few things in the hutch and we call those our antiques.
While I refuse to be classed in the same category as these knickknacks, I can go with being a subject of planned obsolescence. After all, I am the son of a TV repairman who made a living off of the concept, not only fixing customer’s TVs but selling them new ones when the old ones were past their prime.
This was back in the day when televisions and radios were fairly easy to fix. Pop open the back, test the tubes which all had specific functions to make the TV work, pop in new ones and you’re all set. I even knew how to fix a television back then.
Now, I know that in many respects I am like these televisions in the fifties. A “repairman” can pop me open with some work and replace a lot of my parts. I expect that in the coming years nearly every part of me can be replaced. At a cost.
And there’s the rub. Any TV can be repaired today, but at what cost? As long as you’re willing to foot the bill, someone is willing to fix your TV, your computer, your washing machine – what have you.
But it is a lot cheaper to replace it outright. And I would expect in many cases that that is what a repairman does. He charges you $400 to “fix” your 32″ TV, picking up an identical one at K-Mart for $199. Everyone’s happy. He makes money; you get your TV back.
No one is going to make a new me obviously. I imagine that they will perfect cloning at which point I can get OEM parts for me as they fail, but I’m not sure I am going to ever be able to afford the repair bills. For instance, a new heart will run you $145,000, not including the doctor’s fees or anesthesia.
That is a chunk of change. At some point, someone in this world will decide it’s simply not worth that much money to make me like new again. It will be cheaper to just let me go and let new models replace me.
And I’m good with that. I replaced someone else along the way, perhaps a two pack a day smoker whose lungs gave out. He “broke” and I replaced him in the job market. Eventually I bought someone else’s home who also broke down along the way. Landfills, junkyards, recycle centers and cemeteries are filled with the stuff we can no longer fix. It is just the way the world works.
I know that I personally have been living on borrowed time for some time now. No, this isn’t some dire warning that I have a fatal disease or anything. I just know that at some point in the future, my warranty will run out. And as we all know, everything breaks a day or two after it does.
I am waiting for the day I finally reach my breaking point. I’m hoping that I will still be worth repairing. But with my luck, they will point to the small print in the warranty, the one about being obsolete and not worth the trouble.
In the Emerald City, looking for spare parts on eBay,
– Robb