consumer product.33 The average person in America and Britain discards his or her mobile phone within eighteen months of purchase, even though mobile phones will last for ten years on average. (In Japan, the time span from purchase to discard is merely a year.) Every year more than 130 million still-working mobile phones in the United States and 15 million in the UK are retired. Only a small fraction are reassembled for reuse.34 The iPod is not far behind the mobile phone in claiming the ‘shortest life cycle’ crown. For a product introduced in 2001, it is remarkable that by 2009 it had already gone through six ‘generations’ of the first ‘Classic’ model (and that does not even include the extensions of the family such as the Shuffle, Nano, Mini and Touch). If you were one of those consumers who ‘upgraded’ to every new iPod that had come onto the market from 2001 to 2009, you would now own eighteen iPods.35
We are addicted to new products. According to Colin Campbell, a professor of sociology at the University of York, we suffer from ‘neophilia’. Campbell argues that novelty seeking is a new phenomenon. ‘Pre-modern societies tend to be suspicious of the novel. It is a feature of modernity that we are addicted to novelty.’36 Medieval period fashions changed slowly and slightly over the course of a thousand years. Clothing was primarily a matter of necessity rather than of ever-changing fashion.
The stories of the founding fathers of the automobile industry, Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, illustrate a dividing line between comfort with the tried and true and the endless chase of the new. One believed in a hyperthyroid economy that could be sustained only through a constant consumer demand for new goods, while the other, the master of mass production, initially rejected force-fed repetitive consumption.
Henry Ford learned the honest values of quiet country living on a small farm in Dearborn, a rural town just west of Detroit. He spent most of his childhood tending the fields and milking cows. But it was clear from a young age that Henry would not be a farmhand forever. Indeed, he had a gift for mathematics and loved tinkering with machines of all kinds, especially watches. When he founded the Ford Motor Company in 1901, Ford knew that he wanted to make owning a car possible for everyone. Ford, committed to social change, believed a ‘one size fits all’ approach to cars could be a great class leveller. He realized this dream with the introduction of the first Model T in 1908, a car that was simple to drive, cheap, easy to repair, and durable.
Alfred Sloan, in contrast, had a wealthy and privileged upbringing in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied electrical engineering at MIT, where students were taught to focus on inventing the ‘next big thing’. After graduating at the top of his class, he joined Hyatt Rolling, a small ball bearings manufacturer, acquired by General Motors in 1916. At the age of twenty-six, he became president when his father, a prosperous businessman, bought the company. When Sloan became president of GM in the early 1920s, he faced the threat of an ever-expanding used-car market and an ever-lowering price tag of the Model T. It was around the same time that he brought the new Chevrolet to market. Observing how the fashion and textile industries were growing at a rapid rate by updating designs, he proposed that consumers would trade up for style as much as for technological improvements long before their old cars wore out. He convinced his team to restyle the body covering of what was essentially a nine-year-old piece of technology under the banner of ‘product innovation’. The Chevrolet was a remarkable success and the idea of ‘perceived obsolescence’ and ‘change for change’s sake’ was born. Obsolescence was now built not just into the product itself, but into our minds. GM went so far as to define its strategy as choreographed cosmetic ‘upgrades’ to ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied’. In 1929, Charles Kettering, director of research for Sloan, wrote an article declaring, ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction. . . . If everyone were satisfied no one would want to buy the new thing.’37 This cry became an increasingly popular concept as companies realized they no longer had a production problem but rather had a demand problem. They needed to shift their attention to finding new ways to sell existing products.
For fifteen years Ford showed a fanatical dedication to sticking with the Model T’s original design (with the exception of a few minor changes). In 1922, he proclaimed, ‘We have been told . . . that the object of business ought to be to get people to buy frequently and that [it] is bad business to try to make anything that will last forever. . . . Our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. . . . We never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete.’ Ford maintained consumer demand by competing on costs, bringing the price of the Model T down from $950 in 1909 to $290 by 1924 through the efficiencies and scale made possible by the assembly line.38 But by 1927, with most families who could afford one owning a car, the increasing competition of GM’s lavish and continual design ‘improvements’ and the rumblings of the Great Depression, this strategy faltered. After the 15 millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line, production halted, and cars such as the Model A and V-8 with multiple different styles of models were born. Henry Ford lost the battle to obsolescence.
The efficiencies of mass production only grew during World War II. Goods rolled off assembly lines faster than they could be consumed, jamming warehouses. As Vance Packard writes in the The Waste Makers, ‘The challenge was to develop a public that would always have an appetite as voracious as its machines.’39 Advertisers called the time between when a product was made and when that product was purchased by the consumer ‘time lag’. To reduce that gap, manufacturers induced people to buy more and more products, faster, and to create desire even when customer needs were already met. Perceived obsolescence, making products feel out-of-date, less desirable, and in need of replacement, was a strategy mastered by the car makers, but it was not enough. Consumers still controlled their desires to update or upgrade. Manufacturers needed to take this decision out of their hands.
Designing for the Dump
In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, the aging salesman with an unwavering devotion to the American dream, laments, ‘Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it is broken! I am always in a race with the junkyard!’ His outburst continues, ‘The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddamn maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you’ve finally paid for them, they’re used up.’ Willy was experiencing the pains of ‘death dating’, the idea of deliberately building into the product different ways to shorten its life, carefully controlled by the manufacturer.
Planned obsolescence was a concept first suggested not by an economist, a manufacturer or even an advertiser, but by a Manhattan real estate broker. In 1932, Bernard London wrote a twenty-page pamphlet called ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. London proposed starting a government agency that would determine the ‘lease of life’ of every manufactured product, be it a car, a hair comb, a ship or even a building. After the allotted time expired, ‘these things would be legally dead.’ Consumers would have a choice: they could give up the item, and be paid part of the price of a new one, or use the product past its ‘expiration date’ and pay a penalty tax. While the regulatory details of London’s concept were not enforced, the principle of the proposal was adopted by product designers in the fifties who started to ‘design for the dump’.
During the twentieth century, the average human life span in the United States increased by more than thirty years, twenty-five years of which are attributed to advances in medicine and public health.40 In contrast, over the last fifty years, the life span of everyday ‘durable’ goods including refrigerators, toasters and washing machines has decreased anywhere between three and seven years. In 1901, Shelby Electric Company produced an incandescent ‘Centennial’ lightbulb. The original, more than one hundred years later, still lights up the fire station in Livermore, California, where it was first installed. In contrast, in 1932, a memo circulated at GE stating, ‘We should change the life of the 200-watt 110–120 volt PS 30 bulb lamp from 1,000 hours . . . to 750 hours.’41 GE, like many other companies, shortened the life span of its products to increase sales.
Just One More Factor
