Читать книгу A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life - Tara Button, Tara Button - Страница 11
ОглавлениеWhy 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 to be a ‘kind of motorised magic carpet on which social egos could ascend’.5
The manufacturers would say that the public demanded these constant style changes, but in fact the public had been trained to expect them by the manufacturers themselves. As Charles Kettering, head of research at General Motors, famously wrote, his job was to make people dissatisfied with what they had already.
However, while all the other car manufacturers were tweaking the designs, one company bucked the trend. The VW Beetle looked exactly the same from 1949 to 1963. In fact, the company ran an advert celebrating the fact. Called the ‘VW Theory of Evolution’. It showed every identical-looking car with its year number, lined up in neat rows. Underneath was written:
‘Can you spot the Volkswagen with the fins? Or the one that’s bigger? Or smaller? Or the one with the fancy chrome work? You can’t? The reason you can’t see most of our evolutionary changes is because we’ve made them deep down inside the car. And that’s our theory: never change the VW for the sake of change, only to make it better. That’s what keeps our car ahead of its time. And never out of style.’6
As VW shows here, there is an alternative way for successful companies to behave if they choose to take it.
REASONS FOR WASTEFUL BUYING
Before the twentieth century, people didn’t naturally switch their possessions before they were worn out, so reasons had to be invented to get us to change things on a regular basis. To be fair to Christine Frederick, she did say that changes to products should not just be for change’s sake, but ‘for the sake of increased knowledge of taste, color, line, efficiency, better workmanship, health, hygiene and fitness’. Let’s pick these reasons apart.
Taste, colour and line
If a designer comes up with new colour schemes and shapes which the media proclaim to be ‘good taste’, is this a good reason to change what we have?
I would say it isn’t, as taste is in the eye of the taster. You simply can’t say someone has ‘better taste’ than someone else. That would be like saying someone’s preference for vanilla ice cream was better than someone else’s preference for strawberry.
Our preferences can change over time, of course, which is why it’s important to dig deeper into our true taste when we choose our products in the first place. More on this later, but for now, let’s carry on with Christine’s list of reasons to chuck out our stuff.
More efficiency
‘More efficiency’ is something to strive for, but unless the product in question is a vehicle, appliance or insulation, this isn’t a reason to jettison what we already have. Also, we’ve come to the point now where energy-efficiency improvements in appliances have plateaued, so unless your current model is very old or polluting, it’s always better environmentally and financially to hold on to the one you have. The carbon and money you’d save with the more efficient model would be wiped out by the energy and money needed for the new purchase. If you want to buy something new based on efficiency, wait for the great leaps forward that happen less often, such as moving to solar energy.
Better workmanship
Changing products regularly is a sure-fire way to undermine good workmanship, and sadly, workmanship standards have been proven to decline when we get into the habit of obsolescence. This is partly due to a decrease in the price and an increase in mass production and partly because there’s no point in putting proper craftsmanship into objects that will be thrown away in a couple of years.
Improved health and hygiene
This is a common marketing ploy for new household products. Companies have done a great job of convincing us that every cranny and surface in our homes is crawling with dangerous microbes. However, much of this fear-mongering is simply to sell us things. For example, washing your hands with normal soap and water is just as effective as the antibacterial soap sold at jumped-up prices.7
In the twenty-first century, we bleach and disinfect everything in sight, but just as we all have ‘good bacteria’ in our gut, we also need them on our skin for it to function properly. There is also evidence to suggest that our over-clean homes aren’t allowing our children’s immune systems to develop properly. Kids who grow up on farms and are subjected to the widest range of bacteria show significantly reduced levels of asthma.8
Nowadays kitchenware and bathroom accessories are often sold as being more hygienic, but as long as basic hygiene is used, such as washing your hands after using the bathroom and making sure that anything touching raw chicken is washed thoroughly, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get sick from the natural microbes that live in the house. Sterile isn’t something we should be aiming for. For a healthy life, cleanish is clean enough.
Medical innovation is to be encouraged; however, when it comes to health, while a couple of innovations such as car safety and less polluting cookers have had a big impact, I’d recommend turning a deaf ear to the health and fitness industry’s insistence that we need heaps of equipment, supplements and gadgets. We actually require very little to be healthy. Varied unprocessed food, clean water, clean air and a decent amount of activity. Done.
Better fitness
Here, I think Christine means a product that is more ‘fit for purpose’ or more ‘convenient’, and I acknowledge that we want innovations to make products better at what they do.
However, a huge amount of ‘innovation’ around convenience is also change for change’s sake, and much of the innovation overcomplicates products that worked wonderfully in their simplicity. I have an engineer friend for whom this is a personal gripe: ‘A toaster doesn’t need to be able to do your tax return, it just has to make bread warm and a bit brown on each side.’ But often companies will add extra elements to products to justify a higher price tag and to make their product seem new and different from previous models.
My instinct is that most of the time these ‘innovations’ aren’t needed. To prove this to myself, I tried to imagine what my life would be like if all consumer product innovation had stopped in the Thirties, just after Christine’s book came out. Would life be unbearable, or even that different? Not at all. Almost everything in my home would be just as good, if not better, for being made in the Thirties. The only things I think I would miss are the kitchen appliances and boiler, the hoover, my laptop, phone, electric toothbrush and car. Around twelve items. That’s paltry when you think of all the products that have come out since the Thirties. How many of them truly do their jobs better?
HOW TO FIGHT PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE
Recognise it and call it out
Christine might claim not to have encouraged change for change’s sake, but this is precisely what happened once the idea of psychological obsolescence took hold.
One of the little-understood effects of psychological obsolescence is described by Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things. He explains in essence that designers are under pressure to bring out something that looks different every year, so they never get to perfect their creations and make them the best they can be. They have to start from scratch each time so that something different is seen on the shelves.9
We can get designers out of this trap by recognising psychological obsolescence and calling it out when we see it. We should make a distinction between what is genuine progress (switching from a petrol to an electric car) and what is change for change’s sake (a car with a slightly wider grill, or ‘Seventies accents’), and shouldn’t give up on our products to buy new versions unless there is a compelling reason to do so. A 5 per cent better pillow or coffee machine isn’t good enough. If it’s 50–100 per cent better, I might consider it. If it’s solving a problem I actually have, I might be interested. Even if the new design is eco-friendlier, in almost all cases (highly polluting cars aside), it’s more environmentally sound to stick with what we have for as long as possible.
Find your ‘true taste’
As I write this, a decor magazine is urging me to kiss last year’s trends of zig-zag patterns and brushed metal goodbye and give my home a different look and feel with butterflies and folding furniture. But the new trends they’re offering are completely arbitrary and not necessarily a look that resonates with my personal aesthetic.
What you choose to bring into your home can have a profound effect on your mood, energy levels and the time you must spend keeping it in order. Unfortunately, when it comes to buying homeware, psychological obsolescence swings into full force. To counter it, it pays to know your true taste. You may know it already. If not, try the exercise below.
exercise
IDENTIFYING YOUR HOMEWARE AESTHETIC
This exercise will take at least twenty minutes, so make sure you have enough time.
• Grab a notebook or open a computer document. Make two columns: Like and Dislike.
• Now go online and search for images of interiors. Don’t go to an interior magazine, but somewhere like Pinterest, Instagram or Google images where you can see a mix of pictures from all eras, from the Tudors to the present day.
• Spend the first five minutes just seeing the colours in the pictures, nothing else. Start jotting down those you do and don’t like in an interior setting and any colour combinations you like.
• Then spend five minutes on textures and patterns – for example, natural wood, clapboard, granite and polka dots.
• Now spend five minutes on styling – for example, window shutters and jugs of flowers.
• Spend the last five minutes on types of furniture and appliances – for example, wing chairs, log coffee tables and retro fridges.
Keep this list handy or go one step further and make a mood board to arm yourself against fads and future-proof your homeware purchases. (For detailed advice on how to find long-lasting homeware, see Chapter 13.)
Resist the lure of the latest technology
There is a sort of ‘natural’ obsolescence that occurs when a new object comes to market and is so good and useful that no one wants the old version. The iPod killed the CD, the CD killed the cassette and the cassette killed the record for everyone apart from hipsters. It’s like a technological survival of the fittest.
It’s not helpful or realistic to expect the world to stop inventing. Past innovations have meant that we live longer now, get to experience more things, travel more widely and have a broader understanding of the world and the people in it. Innovation may even lead to our salvation, with inventions such as Tesla’s solar roof tiles. But it’s also left us with a poisoned and polluted planet and allowed us to harm each other at an increasing rate and distance.
It’s worth questioning our upgrading impulses and thinking through the implications of it. Technology companies turn to psychological obsolescence to make us upgrade whether the new product is significantly better or not. There’s no real reason why Apple should launch new products every year, but mostly we accept this unquestioningly. Start to question it. This is vital, because the lifespans of these products are now shorter than ever, and electrical waste is growing at a scary rate. Eight per cent of our household waste is now electronic10 and 42 million tons of it was generated in 2014.11 Much of it still works perfectly. It’s estimated that if we sold the items instead of trashing them, people in the UK would make £220 million and people in the USA would make around $1 billion.12 It isn’t just that many of these products are toxic once they begin to rot in the ground, but also that they have valuable and rare materials still inside them. These are lost to us forever, buried underneath a town’s worth of carrot peelings, chicken bones and poopy nappies.
In one episode of the TV series What to Buy and Why,13 my engineer friend Tom Lawton goes to a trash heap and picks out a pair of earphones, a vacuum cleaner and a microscooter. Within a couple of minutes, he finds the problems and fixes them easily. The items are worth several hundred pounds.
If we could just make a clone army of Toms and set them up fixing the world’s electronics, all would be well. One Tom in every town. When I suggested this to him, he laughed and replied, ‘There used to be – tinkers.’
These people are becoming rarer, but they do exist, and if we start making the effort to repair rather than replace, there will soon be many more of them. We can also set up petitions and lobby the government to help us repair and reuse. The state runs our recycling facilities because it sees the benefits. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t run a reuse facility as well.
Governments can help in other ways too. For example, Sweden has reduced the tax on repairing to try and encourage people to go down that route.
It took time for us to get used to the idea of recycling and it will take us a while to get into the swing of repairing and reusing. But if governments and reuse companies make it easy and promote the benefits, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t become completely natural to send products off to the repair yard instead of to the junkyard. (For more on repairing, see Chapter 14 and Appendix I.)
Read on
I believe that psychological obsolescence is even more insidious and dangerous than physical obsolescence, because with the right messaging, marketers can get into your head and make you dislike the things that you liked perfectly well when you bought them. So read on. Many of the chapters in this book are focused on helping you deal with the lure of psychological obsolescence:
• Chapters 4 and 5 explore advertising and marketing. You will learn how to combat these messages and buy things on your own terms.
• Chapters 6 and 7 will talk you through how to discover your own clothing style and step off the trend treadmill.
• Chapter 9 will help you discover your inner purpose so that whatever you buy nourishes the important goals in your life.
• Chapters 11 to 15 will give you the practical advice you need while you’re out shopping and once you have the products in your life.
We’ll start with advertising – the fuel that makes obsolescence run.
