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
