Why does a thing often break down as soon as the loan is repaid for it? Why does one day the printer stops printing and the iPod runs out of battery?
Almost a century has passed since the shadow organized forces began to tightly control the global production of consumer goods, in various ways forcing the consumer to abandon low-quality purchases in favor of new acquisitions.
Have you noticed that cell phones, laptops and other gadgets run out of battery over time? That the printer stops printing even if new ink is refilled? That the software is updated every now and then, refusing to work with documents from previous versions? What's cheaper to buy a new thing than to repair an old one?
That the warranty period for large household appliances is no more than three years, and that the ubiquitous Teflon pans must be disposed of in a maximum of two years? But the old typewriters still work today, not to mention the cast-iron kitchen utensils of our great-grandmothers …
Currently, all manufacturers, regardless of the country and the free market, are forced to obey the unwritten law: "If the product is good, they will soon stop producing it." As soon as everyone who wants to buy something made "for centuries" - it will be the end of the business for the manufacturer.
If people stop buying, the economy as a whole stops - at least such a model of it, when the rich are constantly getting richer, and the poor always have enough money for only the most necessary, and then in the best case. Experts call it just that - "the economy of growth", and its essence lies not in satisfying the needs of consumers (although many prefer to think so), but in "growth for the sake of growth." It's funny that the entire "civilized" world today lives under the actual slogan of a cancerous tumor, isn't it? But does the disease itself ever think that the faster it progresses, the closer its own end?
First, be brought up on the ideals of consumerism, and then endlessly work - to endlessly buy new things to replace those that deliberately deteriorate as soon as the loan is paid off for them. For wealthier people, the picture is a little different: they are told that they will not be happy until they acquire the services of stylists and designers, the latest models of phones, branded clothing and accessories, cars and similar expensive toys that change almost every half. of the year.
In general, marketers have dug three holes in the buyer's journey: credit, advertising, and directly planned obsolescence. The latter has long been a must in the curriculum of engineering and design schools: future professionals must take into account the business plan of management in their work in order to develop exquisite junk with a short shelf life.
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The first victim of planned obsolescence was, oddly enough, the symbol of progress - the light bulb. Around Christmas 1924, several unnamed financiers gathered in secret in Geneva and created the first worldwide Phoebus cartel - never officially established, but firmly in control of the production of light bulbs. Phoebus united manufacturers from all over the world - Europe, USA, Brazil, Australia, colonies in Asia and Africa. Among them are such well-known giants as, for example, the Dutch company Philips and the German Osram.
The first Edison light bulb, which went on sale in 1881, was designed for 1.5 thousand hours of operation, and by 1924 its service life was extended to 2.5 thousand hours. However, Phoebus created a special committee and a whole bureaucratic apparatus, which obliged manufacturers to produce lamps that work no more than a thousand hours. Those companies that did not meet this norm were fined by the cartel - and so on until the world received lamps of even worse quality than their original prototype.
The birth of a consumer society
But the Americans still did not have time to buy everything that was produced. Already in 1928, a warning appeared in one of the magazines: "a product that has no wear is a tragedy for business." The stock market does crash next year, and an unprecedented crisis begins in the United States. By 1933, one in four Americans had lost their jobs!
The idea of planned obsolescence came from a major real estate tycoon in New York - Bernard London. He proposed breaking the deadlock by limiting the shelf life of consumer goods, but for the average man in the street, even in times of crisis, it sounded offensive. Therefore, they did not officially listen to the idea of London - while in practice everything - from stools to hair curlers - expected the same as a light bulb. This is how the United States gradually emerged from the crisis: there was a demand for new goods, and hence for labor.
A striking example of deliberate aging of things is the discovery by the chemical giant DuPont of a revolutionary synthetic fabric - nylon, from which heavy-duty women's stockings were created. So strong they were even used for towing cars! Having come to his senses, DuPont urgently changed the nylon formula so that the great-granddaughters of the customers of that time could not use such stockings … Today, as soon as women put on tights a couple of times, arrows appear on them. For chemists themselves, this became a real moral test: why do something worse instead of improving it? But business is business.
In 1954, Brooks Stevens, an industrial designer and engineer, came up with a complementary idea of "how to get customers to come back to the store again and again." Let the thing technically remain more or less serviceable, but you can constantly change the design of the same product so that yesterday's model already seems "unfashionable" and not as good as the thing in the commercial! From this moment, the countdown of classic marketing begins, built on the desire of the buyer to purchase what he basically does not need.
