Are consumer products made to break?

Are consumer products made to break? An interview with author Giles Slade

The following interview is part one of a two-part series on planned obsolescence. The second -- about housing construction -- will be posted next week is now online here.

Madetobreak Last year my sweetie and I inherited a microwave from the previous owners of our new (old) house. The microwave looked like a serious piece of equipment, not a cheap plastic number, but wouldn't power on. For months, we let it sit in the kitchen. When we finally managed to deal with it, our first instinct was, naturally, to toss it and buy a new one.

Sure, why not: we could buy a new oven for the same price as fixing the old. Though the new one was perhaps even more likely to break quickly, we could at least leave the old one on the curb, rather than lugging it to the repair shop. When the new one broke we could always, you know, buy yet another.

As it happens, I was internally debating this when I picked up Giles Slade's illuminating history Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Within the first two pages, Slade makes it very clear that microwave ovens are only the the tip of the iceberg when it comes to electronics that common sense tells us to discard. And discard, we do. From cell phones to PCs to computer monitors and televisions, every year sees an exponential rise in the number of machines tossed into landfills. In 2003, over 63 million working PCs were trashed, In 2004, that number jumped to 315 million. The same trend holds over a wide array of consumer electronics.

More: http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2007/04/are_consumer_pr.html

I had an over the oven Sharp Microwave lose it's clock (due to bad design) and the extended warranty just paid me off and I foolishly bought another one of the same model, which has done the same thing....

One the more interesting side, it is sorta fun playing cooking roulette as you have no idea how many minutes the thing has left.

and more if it lasts 20 years instead of 2. You have to consume to support the corporations so that they shares will go up and up in value so that the rich can get richer. Our microwave is 17 years old-I've repaired it 3 times-nothing major, one switch, two crimp-on connectors and it works just fine. I have a 1986 Subaru and a 1992 Toyota truck, I will drive them until they wear out. Even if I could afford to get a brand new whatever every 2 years I wouldn't.

people will begin to value quality again.

That, and no one will be able to sell extraneous shit in this country for years.

Polar bears, on the other hand, do it right in the open.

My Mom's fridge was about 5 years old when the cooling unit had to be replaced. She called in a company repairman and started complaining how "years ago" appliances didn't break down after only a few years. The man said to her that nowadays major appliances only have a shelf life of about 10 years. They are meant to break down, he said, so the consumer has buy a new one and the company can make more money.

This event took place 20 years ago. It's nothing new.

is the horizontal over-the-counter GE model that was original when our house was built in the mid-1950s. So that makes it about 50 years old or so. Not very energy efficient but still runs good.

My first house (which I just sold to my mother last fall) had a 1940s stove in it when I bought it. One of the elements was burned out in the oven, but the other still worked and I never got around to fixing it. All the eyes still worked. Heck, even the old manual clock/timer still worked!! The house was built in the late 40s or early 50s - typical rancher that had been well-maintained.

I only got rid of it when I married my husband. He wanted a flat cooktop and purchased a stove for us shortly after he moved in.

Had I not married, I would have gone to an appliance store, gotten a new element and kept on using the thing for years to come. I ended up donating it to the local battered women's shelter.

Our stove is the original also, so it's only fifty or so. Two elements burned out, I haven't replaced them but will someday. I hate buying new stuff.

do bears defecate in the woods?

it's entirely intentional as a way to sell more, but that's certainly one side effect of just generally making crappier stuff.

My mother's first vacuum cleaner after she got married lasted her 35 years. She's had 3 in the 15 years since the first one finally died.

Another problem is that there's really no easy, affordable way to get anything repaired anymore. When an applicance used to cost $600, and cost $25 to repair, AND there was a repairman who could do it, it was a no-brainer. But when that appliance now costs $350 and it costs $300 to repair it (IF you can even find a repairman) people will often just buy a new one.

Edit: SOME consumer items seem sturdier than ever. My last TV lasted me 12 years - I kept WANTING it to break so I could justify buying a new one. But the thing just kept plugging. I gave it to a friend 5 years ago, and it's STILL working with no problems. :shrug:

With a brand new dishwasher. After three years the control panel went out and I called for a repair. It cost $195. A new dishwasher just like it cost $250 at Sears. I did watch what the repair guy did so when it went out again three years later (he used the exact same part to replace the burnt out one) I was able to buy the same part and replace it myself for about $40. It burnt out yet again this year and I finally gave up and bought a new one.

My mom did the same thing with her Kenmore washing machine.

My son pulled the little knob out of the back that the cable plugs into. I got it fixed for less than $50, which I certainly couldn't have gotten another TV for (and this is a nice Magnavox TV). The old guy who fixed it runs a small appliance shop in the heart of the old part of the city - the business probably has been in his family for years.

It can still be done, but you certainly have to know the right people to do it.

Now they are under a hundred so quality had to drop.

Don

what good timing! My oven stopped working and put up these error codes today. Apparently the "temperature sensor" and probably the "control panel" need to be replaced.

GUESS WHAT? They are very expensive parts and it would cost about the same to fix it as to buy a new one. I'm not sure what to do.

The oven is 8 years old. :( It's a fine oven. At least it was. This so sucks. I think they make the parts so expensive that you decide to just not bother fixing it.

I have an extensive collection of vintage appliances.
They all work like a dream- in the meantime, EVERY
new appliance I have purchased over the last 25 years is in the junk heap.

One appliance in particular I have runs on batteries as well as electricity-
an old shortwave radio.
The batteries last FOREVER in it, however, newer radios I have
that I place batteries in only last a few months with the same usage.

We are being SCREWN, as the freepers say, by the corporate assholes
that sit around and figure out such things.

If you find an older appliance in the local thrift store- BUY it!

BHN:mad:

I agree that things aren't made to last for any longterm duration anymore. While I fault the manufactures for creating lower quality products, I also blame the consumers. That's right, I blame every one of us who consumes and doesn't demand better quality. My grandfather would never have tolerated spending his hard earned money on items that weren't of the highest quality he could afford. We, the modern consumers, have let them get away with creating this situation by meekly consuming and consuming and then consuming some more. Why would manufacturers change their practices when they have an endless flow of money coming in with the way things are now?

I love seeing people paying attention to this issue, it gives me hope that we may just wake up and demand better.

It's not as though we have a lot of choices in the marketplace.

If our stuff is crappy and breaks down in two to four years, what are we to replace it with? More crap? Because there's little else on the market.

Hope you're understanding my question.

The other part is the low cost due to mass production. Creating a new electronic device requires a lot less human labor than repairing an electronic item. Today it is real easy for the repair costs to exceed the price of a new one due to the hourly wages of the repairman.

Developed a burning smell, and then just quit.

The good news is that I did not pay $400. for it at Sears, but $65. at Ebay.

The electronic climate controller has a built in break feature.Inside of it there is a circuit board with three computer chips.Two are soldered on while the third is held in place by glue.
I have had three go bad due to the chip falling off.And a new controller,which can only be bought new through the dealer,cost over $500.

Even cars folks shell out enough bucks to buy a small house for will break and eventually die.

probably the last time good quality products were made. I also inhereted her stand mixer, hand-held eggbeater, and Grandpa's Sears table saw, all probably from the late 1950s as well.

If I get really desperate, I can dig out Papa's old carbide lanterns, from his mining days in the 1920s-30s. They still work, if I could get the carbide.

No, they don't make anything now to last. Otherwise they wouldn't have a market for more cheap junk.

Windows Vista is crap and a lot of hardware doesn't work with it.

XP was ok. Why the need to force new crap on us?

SPEND MORE MONEY FOOLS!

Mine got a sad ipod icon on its screen only 14 months after I bought it. I'm going to get a Nano in the not too distant future. It's more durable because it uses a flash-memory drive instead of a whirling hard drive. I can't get a different mp3 player because the songs I downloaded from itunes will be useless thanks to DRM being coated on the files. "'Da Man" has me locked in.

Unfortunately, I don't think that any of my songs come from EMI artists, so I'm not sure if I can get the DRM removed.

There are basically two things that have led to failure over the years. I've paid close attention to this. But assume that failure is not something companies engineer into products. Perhaps companies that can afford it, maybe. As in large corporations.

First there is the engineering learning curve. New concepts often have weak links. Computer aided drafting is also relatively new by historic timeframe comparison. And using it has taken some getting used to. Here's an example- I just bought a cutting edge mountain bike. Right off the bat a user posts in the forum that he has broken a part on his first ride. It was a highly stressed plastic piece that did not undergo any stress analysis. And may have very well been the result of an incorrect manufacturing process, or even a design miscalculation. Or even a user error. But my point is there are many products out today that have evolved into reliable designs. The first vcrs were huge. Now if you look at a video camera what you'll see is an entire vcr that you hold in the palm of your hand. And highly reliable. Cars started out with engines that occasionally threw a rod or blew a head gasket. It doesn't happen any more. At all. If anything we've increased reliability.

The second is part of the first. But it's related to population. Given that resources are finite, and actually decreasing in quantity, and population has soared, designs have had account for this. Chrome thickness on bumpers was one of the first obvious ones. Part thickness also had to start coming down. As the numbers of pieces has gone up, the design criteria has had to include more frugal material use. Gone are the days of the thick elements in light bulbs. Now that is actually the best argument for designed failure there is. It's about money. The price of tungsten versus the cost of new bulbs. Now we're facing the cost of a new planet. That is going to add another piece to this puzzle. Do we make bulbs that last forever? Again, that is not a simple answer, due to a multiplicity of reasons. But failure has occurred along this design evolution for minimal material use, just as it did with the evolution for functional design. Thin parts that break, new concepts that don't last as long as they need to. So we're fighting an uphill battle. We're trying to supply 6 billion people with stuff while the resources are running out. And we've managed beyond my wildest dreams to actually pull it all off. We're designing for the minimal material use, and getting maximum life out of parts.

Profit is always the bottom line. No company makes stuff in order to lose money. It's not a matter of greed, but survival. So making a part that works, and makes money is the goal. I've never heard of a company that actually intends to have a product fail. Not in a malicious way. Light bulbs- we all curse them. We know they could make a bulb to last essentially forever. But we don't know if they could really make them to last forever, AND make a profit.

We've reached a new era. One where we're making pretty decent products under the circumstances. I honestly don't think we can go much further. Peak oil, population, global warming. It's a pyramid, and we've reached the top.

As for designed failure, not really.

products rushing to market with, in some cases, either a producers eye on advances he is aware of not yet employed, bench tests & such; or knowledge of inferior materials or components yeah...i can see that happening x(

but i would think ladders made to break, as a for instance, might be figured out rather quickly

Same battery in the garage door opener lasted for 20+ years.
New lightbulbs burn out in a matter of months. But old ones could last for decades.

Nowadays, blenders have easily breakable plastic parts instead of metal.
And new vacuums have belts that break within a few months.

American goods are mostly crap now. It's been that way since the late 1980s.

I really started noticing this in the seventies, how people's TVs and radios would break down and die after about ten years. Meanwhile our old RCA B&W console, a wedding gift when my parents were married in 1950, kept plugging along. As did the Halicrafter radio(with seven shortwave bands) Electrolux vacumn cleaner, Sunshine mixer and many, many other consumer products that my parents furninshed their house with during the fifties.

But this was still the days of repair shops, and you could get most anything fixed fairly cheap, certainly cheaper than buying a new item.

But as the eighties wore on, more and more products seemed to break down and die more frequently, while repair shops started getting both expensive and scarce. I had to travel to a little burg out in the boonies to find somebody to fix my TV, a small B&W model I had purchased just five years earlier.

This trend has continued rising through the ninties and into the twenty first century. Now repairing a product is as expensive as buying a new model. It seems as though the life cycle for certain products has shortened dramatically. TVs, stereos, other electronics seem to have a little self destruct program that kicks in after ten years.

Fortuneately I've inheirited, or had handed down, a number of parents older things. The TV, with cherry wood cabinet, still works, as does the Halicrafter radio. The vacumn cleaner finally died, and sadly the one that we replaced it with has already had some problems. My sister still uses the big mixer, and there are several other items that are in storage, backups for when our current items kick the dust.

And sadly, this trend has been applied to our cars and trucks also. Not only do cars need more repairs, but they die sooner, for the most part, especially American models. Really, this is quite sad, for it not only costs us more money, but it also destroys our enviroment. The only ones who benefit are the corporations who get to sell more cheap crap to the consuming public. Quality could be built in, but where's the profit in it? Another entrenched mindset that needs to be changed.