Читать книгу A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life - Tara Button, Tara Button - Страница 10

2

Planned Obsolescence

or

Why they don’t make ’em like they used to

‘Obsolescence’ is a horrible mouthful of a word that essentially means ‘when something becomes useless’. ‘Planned obsolescence’, therefore, is when people plan for products to become useless. Deliberately. Let that sink in for a second.

There are two main ways planned obsolescence happens. The first is physical, where companies design products to break before they need to. That is the subject of this chapter. The other is psychological obsolescence, where people are made to feel that they no longer want the possessions they already have. We’ll look at that in the next chapter.

But first I’m going to take you back to the Twenties and Thirties to discover how planned obsolescence came about. I’ll also share with you some of the shocking evidence of companies who have conspired against us to change the way we buy forever.

WHO PLANNED IT?

Planned obsolescence was born and brought up (to be very naughty) in America. ‘Obsolescence is the American way,’ boasted industrial designers Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens in their 1932 book Consumer Engineering. And certainly Americans took quickly to the idea of rampantly replacing their possessions, while Europeans still held on to theirs as long as possible. Some people at the time did raise concerns about the extra waste and damage to the environment, but their concerns were quickly brushed under the cheap new rugs that were being made. Sheldon and Arens justified their championing of obsolescence by pointing out that while Europe had used up many of its natural resources, ‘in America, we still have tree covered slopes to deforest and subterranean lakes of oil to tap …’¹

America also had a problem with overproduction. By the early Thirties, the States had got very good at making lots of things very quickly, but wasn’t too good at selling them. The stock market had crashed and the country was in the middle of what became known as the Great Depression, with millions jobless and around half of all children without decent shelter or food to eat. In these conditions we can’t blame people for clutching at ideas like planned obsolescence to solve the issues, even if we are now left to deal with the fallout.

In 1932 a Russian-American called Bernard London published a grand plan entitled ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. After noticing that people held onto their products longer in a depression and this meant less money being spent on goods, he suggested that every product, from shoes to cars, houses to hats, be given a set lifespan. Once that lifespan was up, the items would be legally ‘dead’ and people would have to turn them in to the government to be destroyed or risk a fine. They would then of course have to buy them again new.

Mr London sold his idea as the saving grace of the US economy. ‘Miracles do happen,’ he said. ‘But they must be planned in order to occur.’²

This particular miracle never came off. Maybe because the government realised that forcing people to hand over their possessions for incineration was a sure-fire way to get unelected.

What ended up happening was stealthier. Businessmen, politicians, manufacturers and the advertising industry colluded to change both products and minds, with the aim of turning citizens into consumers. In fact they had been colluding already.

The lightbulb conspiracy

It’s very hard to find a smoking gun when you go looking for evidence of people deliberately building things to break. Unsurprisingly, this is not something that companies will admit to doing if you call up their head office. The most famous proven case was the subject of a truly shocking documentary called The Light Bulb Conspiracy.³ It’s famous because it’s one of the few times we’ve found actual written proof that this shady practice takes place.

By 1924, lightbulbs had been getting better in quality for some time; some were now lasting up to 2,500 hours. Then representatives of the biggest electric companies in the world, including Osram, Philips and General Electric, met in Geneva on the night before Christmas to hatch a very unChristmassy plan.

By the end of the meeting in a cramped back room, they had formed a secret group known as the Phoebus Cartel, and had all agreed to send their bulbs to Switzerland regularly to be tested to ensure they broke within 1,000 hours. They had even agreed to be fined for every hour they went over the limit.

What they were doing was on very dodgy legal ground and we know that not everyone was completely happy about it. Some engineers attempted to get around the 1,000-hour limit by designing bulbs of a higher voltage, but they were soon found out and scolded by the head of Philips:

‘[This bulb design] is a very dangerous practice and is having a most detrimental influence on the total turnover of the Phoebus Parties … After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long-life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life.’⁴

They did not sink back into the ‘mire’. If you look at the graph below, showing how long bulbs last, you’ll see that there’s a steady decline until the cartel reached their goal and the average bulb expectancy ground out at around 1,025 hours.

Photo: Landesarchiv Berlin

How did they get away with it? Many of the changes were sold to consumers as efficiencies and improvements in brightness. And despite lasting less than half as long as the older lightbulbs, the new ones were often even more expensive.

The companies profited enormously from their tactics; one reported that their sales had increased fivefold since they’d changed their designs to be more delicate.

The cartel was disbanded during the Second World War, when it became a little awkward for German, British and American businessmen to get together. But the damage had been done; the life expectancy of bulbs didn’t recover.

I recently had the pleasure of talking to several people who work in the lightbulb industry today. When I shared the story of the 1924 Phoebus Cartel, they said that in many ways things were no better now.

One engineer told me that one of the most underhanded tactics she’d witnessed recently was bulbs being sold with an advertised life of seven years but purposefully designed so they would only last two or three years, just long enough to avoid customer complaints and returns. And this company was a major player in the lightbulb world.

‘They’re lying to us,’ she said bluntly. ‘The lightbulb industry is full of misinformation. I’ve run independent tests on bulbs and some of them are running so hot there’s no way the components inside them will survive the time the packaging says they will.

‘There are all sorts of cheats going on. For example, “15,000-hour lifetime” might be written in large print on the front of the box, while “one-year guarantee” might be written in small print on the back. And then you get guarantees that are only valid if the bulb is used for one to two hours per day.’

This misinformation has sadly stopped genuinely good bulbs from succeeding, as customers can’t see the difference.

One scene from The Light Bulb Conspiracy which filled me with dread was footage of a teacher in a design college handing out various products to his students and asking them how long they thought they were designed to last. ‘It’s important for you to know,’ he said, ‘because you’ll have to design to a certain lifespan and to the business model the company wants.’ This is particularly disheartening, as he’s teaching the next generation of designers not to make the best products they can, but ones that last as long as they need to for the company to sell them.

Beyond bulbs

By the Fifties, obsolescence was fully grown and had left home to travel the world. Now its influence can be seen everywhere, from the furniture left outside to be picked up in Europe to the mountains of electrical waste in Asia.

In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties voices did start being raised about the need for products to last longer to avoid an environmental crisis, but governments and businesses chose instead to concentrate their efforts on recycling.

Recycling is a positive thing and certainly takes away the guilt we feel about discarding something. But the truth is the environmental difference between being able to carry on using something and recycling it is colossal. Recycling still takes energy, waste collection and processing, and usually manufacturing a new object to replace the one we are discarding. This suits companies very well, but we and our planet end up paying the price.

So here we are. The calls for longer-lasting products have been ignored for decades, planned obsolescence reigns supreme and the commercial world is steaming us blindfold into an iceberg of trash.

QUALITY STRIPPING

We’ve all experienced quality stripping, and I’m not talking about particularly adept G-string jiggling. If ‘building it to break’ is the famous poster child of planned obsolescence, ‘quality stripping’ is probably the most common tactic used. It’s being done to products all over the world, all of the time, and it’s not even being denied, it’s just being explained away.

In the spring of 2017, I was invited to the wilds of Yorkshire to visit Morphy Richards, a prominent British home appliances firm. I was thrilled that they were open to talking about longevity, as every other company I’d spoken to was quick to be defensive about the issue. I took the opportunity to question them about why things didn’t last as long as they used to.

‘I’ve been told by an engineer friend,’ I said, ‘that it isn’t necessarily that things are built to break, but that every year you might be asked to take more costs out of the product, so the materials get thinner and cheaper and the quality starts to come down. Is this true?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ they agreed. ‘It’s all about cost. With enough money, we can make you something that lasts as long as you want, but we have to hit a certain price to please the marketers and retailers.’

This all sounds quite reasonable, but the effect of it is not. There is solid evidence that appliances are breaking earlier and earlier. In fact, the number of appliances that must be replaced because of breakage has doubled since 2004. Most shockingly, boilers used to last a wonderful 23 years in 1980, but are only expected to last 12 years by 2020.⁵

There is also a heartbreaking disconnect between the people who design and make the products and the people who make the decisions to forego quality. Engineers are craftsman and generally want to make the highest-quality products they can. But many businesspeople see manufacturing companies purely as money-making projects. Whether they make hairdryers or hamburgers makes no difference to them.

The cost-cutting decisions might not even be made by the company that makes the product but by an “umbrella” company which owns a lot of brands. That company may be so far away from the making of the actual product, they may not even know what it looks like. But they can still demand that the engineers find a way to make it 10 per cent cheaper than they did the year before. You can’t do this for long before the lifespan of the product is affected.

‘Companies have become increasingly short term in their thinking,’ admitted Thor Johnsen, who has been in the business of buying, selling and managing other companies for many years. ‘They’re greedy for a quick buck, and short-term greed produces massive problems. Companies will put nearly all their money into their branding and marketing, spend a bit on design and then build their products as cheaply as possible. That’s the model now.’

‘Why are they getting away with it?’ I asked.

‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘shoppers might say they want quality when we ask them, but when we watch them, they don’t actually buy for quality. They buy for convenience or price.’

‘Do you think part of the trouble,’ I suggested, ‘is that people go into a shop and see a row of products and can only guess which one lasts the longest? So they end up going for what’s cheapest or what goes best with their kitchen.’

‘Yeah, that might be it,’ he said. ‘Branding used to help us know which was the best quality. But that’s just not the case anymore.’

So far, so depressing. And this isn’t the end of the bad news. Have you ever noticed that sometimes online reviews look as though people are talking about entirely different-quality products, even while reviewing supposedly the same item? Of course different people have different expectations, but several engineers have told me that with so many products being made overseas, there is a temptation for factories to secretly change the quality of the products after the first couple of batches. The factories win the business by making something great, but then start cutting corners. Or everything but the corners. Unless these products are then tested, they make it into the shops and quickly into landfill.

This isn’t only annoying and wasteful, but also sometimes incredibly dangerous. Tyres might be made with cheaper-quality rubber which explodes at high speeds, or the paint used on toys might be switched for a cheaper toxic lead variety.

One of the most shocking findings was that a shipment of aluminium construction materials, crucial to holding up a building, was found to have decreased in weight to under 90 per cent. All of the profits from that saved aluminium would have gone to the factory owner. All of the responsibility for the danger and the cost of recalls would have gone to the company that sold it. It’s almost impossible to sue a Chinese factory, and because companies like to keep their suppliers secret, the factories don’t have to worry too much about damaging their reputation.⁶

The British appliance company I visited is very aware of these problems, so anything that comes in from overseas is tested by them in their own lab.

‘Nothing comes out of here alive,’ said the head of the lab gleefully as he showed me around. Kettles were boiled, poured, filled and boiled again, boiled dry and abused with mechanical arms. Toasters were tortured – popped and popped and popped again until they broke. Irons were slid over miles and miles of rough denim to ensure that their plates could take the strain of years of use.

‘The factories in China know we do this,’ I was told, ‘so they know they can’t get away with sending over inferior products. If it fails here, it doesn’t go to market.’

Most companies can’t afford their own testing facility, however, so we’re often left at the mercy of unscrupulous manufacturers, some of whom are happy to take our money and give us poison and trash in exchange.

If you’re reading this and thinking it’s as depressing as an empty toilet-roll holder, I apologise. It is depressing, but it’s also important to know what we’re up against, so we can know how to combat it. There’s a section at the end of this chapter on how to do just that.

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.