Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

The Evils of Planned Obsolescence as an Economic Model:
Remember When Things Used to Work?
by Beth Isbell ©2009

What happened to the good old days where when you bought something it worked forever & companies honored their work? Days in which we valued thrift, saving, re-usable products that last, & conservation and protection of our planet's limited natural resources?

Nowadays, corporations intentionally make products that will fail or need replacement or have to be "upgraded" these days so that they can assure themselves of having future sales - it's called planned obsolescence and it's a critical part of most fortune 500 business plans. It's also a critical reason why our economy sucks. This has a lot more to do with corporate greed than it does consumers wanting cheap goods ... and it's not because of "lazy" workers - it's just a matter of greed. Our economic model encourages massive consumption to support production for it's own sake. Not because of need or usefulness. Instead, we derive money from making things that won't last. On purpose. Because it helps the rich get richer.

Planned obsolescence is a disease which infects American culture and threatens' America's future. Consider how many trillions of trillions of dollars American consumers have wasted simply replacing or upgrading things they should never have to - or buying things to make old parts work with the "new" software or "new" hardware - the amount of money wasted is simply mind-boggling ... money that could be invested in our kid's college funds, or put to use in far more beneficial ways by America's families, that is instead just transferred to someone else's pocket ... because they PLANNED for their product to FAIL INTENTIONALLY to PROFIT!

It's gotten to the point of not only being ridiculous, but dangerous!

From an economic perspective, while planned obsolescence "may" stimulate future sales and job growth, it directly devastates savings and investment and requires citizens to generate more future income to simply to maintain the same standard of living. And, as we see, when times get tough corporations cut jobs to protect upper management, and thus, even any anticipated job growth is not guaranteed. The reality is that it breeds an enormous amount of "false" economic activity - simply shifting money from one person's pocket to another - rather than any real growth that is beneficial to American families. Further, it is rapidly destroying the planet's natural resources, diminishing our health, jeopardizing our safety, among other serious problems it creates as this video correctly and cleverly points out: http://www.storyofstuff.com/ The statistics cited in this video are just downright scary!

I don't blame corporations or businesses for wanting to make money or to desire future sales, I just question the long-term impact on society of planned obsolescence as the major strategy to do so. I don't know that I have the answer. If you make products from better materials with US labor do folks buy them or do they just want cheap even if they know it fails. We know the answer - so I think consumers share some blame here. But there certainly are hundred of thousands of products that could have been made for relatively the same cost that would not perform so poorly except that the corporation wanted more sales. How do we, as a society, police & put an end to this? I don't know; but perhaps it's time we started thinking about it and pressuring our legislators to do the same!

Some folks blame labor unions and high wages. As a lifelong advocate of labor, I know from experience and personal observation that unions are sometimes necessary to stop employer's abuse and equal the highly un-level playing field in the workplace ... how many stories have we seen lately about CEO's making $100 million or multiples of that annually while laying off workers or getting taxpayer bailouts? If an employer agreed to pay union workers a particular wage, you can be damn sure that there was a damn good reason for them to agree to do so (like paying wages competitive with their competitors, or soaring profits existing at the time of the agreement, or maybe because the workers actually deserved the raise). Most corporations problems result not from high wages, but from lack of product development, poor strategic planning, abysmal market forecasting, and just piss-poor management which continues to "reward" themselves for their crappy performance by on the backs of the workers that actually made it happen. How about taking management's golden parachutes and 7 or 8 figure salaries, and instead investing it in solid research and development, market forecasting, and paying workers fairly?

Most employers seek to pay their workers fairly to avoid them unionizing, but the reality that I see as a labor attorney is that when workers without unions seek to enforce those promises that they are told that they are "at-will" employees, and that the company's "promises" aren't really promises at all, certainly not enforceable ones, and if anything is adverse to the employer, you can be sure they didn't actually mean it that way & won't abide by it, and will spend lots of money on high-priced lawyers to make sure they don't have to comply. The blunt TRUTH is that almost no promise made by an employer in any employee manual is ever enforceable.

Here's a really interesting report from some heavy hitting economists concluding, as I have, that real wealth - i.e. that of American families is on the decline ... and differs markedly from the measure of the rise and fall of artificial wealth ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-d ... 61392.html

And another really key article discussing that from an economics perspective, the bailout should have gone to real citizens and not to banks and wall street - and why the latter approach was/is seriously flawed:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/09/ ... mmers.html

This video is clever, fascinating, highly educational ... & just downright scary! It really hits the nail on the head. We really need to start breaking away from planned obsolescence as a driving force of our economy!

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

I have held this theory for a long time and wrote my article before I discovered the existence of this video today (note-I edited the original article above to include a link to the video), but I'm certainly glad to find out that other folks have been thinking along the same lines!