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Planned obsolescence keeps you coming back.

Suppose light bulbs cost twice as much but lasted much longer, you would not need to buy them nearly so frequently. Therefore, consumers would spend less money on lightbulbs in a lifetime and the manufacturers would make less money.

Things are often designed to break and force the consumer to purchase new stock. It's known as planned obsolescence.

The only reason to build things to last would be if you cared more about workmanship and pride than economics. While this might be true for individuals, it is almost never true for shareholders and therefore incredibly rare as a company outlook.

Thats true. I forgot about that.

Could that not be a viable business modal though? Pay 25% more for our product, but it lasts you 300% longer.

That sounds great for the consumer. But it makes them less money. The only reason to do so would be if you really care about quality or PR. These are the companies you see in this sub.

I think it could, however that would require a consumer base that actually cared about longevity more than the rush from acquiring the latest greatest shiny thing. Unfortunately that is no longer the world we live in as most of society is more concerned with having the newest thing than buying items that last.

It would be nice if the government provided incentives or passed restrictions on selling junk here.

Could human perception and values not be changed. I know in my grandparents time, they would buy quality stuff, and you would be thought of as a sucker if you bought something that didnt last for a very very long time.

Money are debt ... that means everything have to "grow" all the time, in order to pay the interests ... forever ... FOREVER!

The system's self destruction is literally built in to its foundation.

True. Capitalism inevitably leads to all the assets being funneled into fewer and fewer hands.

I have a subwoofer by Polk that is a perfect example of garbage. It’s designed with a standby mode and will turn on when the amplifier senses a signal. Well this thing is actually on all the time drawing electricity through 2 crappy capacitors with low tolerances. Over a span of time these capacitors heat too much and eventually fail, leaving the owner to junk the whole thing and start anew.

This thing was designed this way on purpose. If you go online you will see some of the owners who know better will replace these capacitors for less than 5 dollars to bring them back to life.

This is what happens with a lot of devices. They plan them to fail just like this. It’s a racket.

Money as debt isn't capitalism ... Money as debt is more like a very devious ponzi scheme, rewarding those close to the money spigot, while draining everyone else.

Fair point, but whatever dodad people use. Shells, debt, gold or whatever, the system still leads to the same place.

Not really ... the reason we produce crap, is because people grow more desperate to generate enough money for interest payments and to keep up with inflation.

If we traded via gold for instance, there would be no pressure for financial growth. On the contrary, everyone would save, because gold would just grow more and more valuable over time, as we can't print more gold. Deflation.

Anyway ... the current system is about to end ... and I guess WW3 is the chosen excuse by our elite.

So, duck and cover :(

I personally dont see gold being able to stop the accumulation of wealth at the top, but we will have to agree to disagree.

I do agree the current system is breaking down.

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One is made in China. The other is made pretty much anywhere else.

Simple. It is said that in China, they even sell fake rat poison. Why? If you can grab a handful of skittles, dye them in blue dye and sell them for 5x the cost of a bag of skittles. Multiply that by the number of households and businesses in China with rate problems = overnight millionaire.

Oh it's so out of style. Last year white kitchen cabinets were in but now our advertising is pushing so that you have to buy these new green kitchen cabinets or or house will look outdated !

As everyone has already stated crony capitalism. All of the major manufacturers have conspired together to make low quality stuff.

Low prices usually means it's an energy hoarder

I always go for expensive ones, while they may cost around a 1000 euros, it will eventually pay back in the long run (in energy saving compared to cheap ones)

Also, I would always check the energy labels, if your country has energy labels

Kind of unrelated, but it really depends on what products

For example, making houses break easily is clearly a stupid idea

Good thing I live in the Netherlands,

Cause the developer of a products needs to state (almost) exactly how it's made, so you're less likely to be bamboozled

I'm also a sucker who hates socialism, but let's not get into politics now :)

The necessary legislation would be passings laws that both:

1. Restricted monopolies and oligopolies and

2. Secured the "right to repair"

If there were a more competitive market, it would incentivize the production of higher quality products to secure more of the market share. And if products were not designed in such a way as to hinder repair, they could be fixed for cheaper than the cost of buying a replacement. This would, in turn, reduce the profit that planned obsolescence brings. These laws have been proposed often and have even passed in some places.

But politicians are richer than their trade and deep pockets weigh heavily on the scales. Everybody has a price, and politicians don't often succeed based on traits of impeccable morality and stalwart resolution to their beliefs.

Capitalism and socialism both have great and stupid ideas

I'm preferring centrism, wiping away the stupid ideas and making more out of the great ideas

Yes, especially some countries in western europe beating up farmers, the Dutch and Belgium farmers have it even worse than the rest

Kinda useless fact, but france cares for their farmers, britain... kinda. Germany? Don't really know what to say about them

I would not apply planned obsolescence to a home, as you make a great point.

Although, a trailer, or mobile home, comes close to countering your point.

I don't think the answer has to be either planned obsolescence or consumer ease, but both. Companies make two categories of products (for the sake of argument) cheap and fragile, and good quality and durable. The worse product is cheaper, the latter more expensive. The consumer, seeing so much false variety in their products, gets overwhelmed and just tries to save money, which leads then to just buying the cheaper one. This "Coincidentally" makes the company more money because the consumer buys more fridges over their life for less money.

Unfortunately in our current economic system, successful firms aren't formed based on good ideas, but on profitable ones. Firms have found that as a whole it's more profitable to sell low quality products more frequently, so that's what we get to deal with

Good thing the Netherlands isn't socialist

We could also just mine more gold (not infinitely I know but more than we have). And given the state of the economy where 97% of the money is fake, what's to stop the rich from just digitizing gold too? We wouldnt need to physically get more gold just like we don't need to physically print more money for there to be more of it

Important to note, it's not China's fault for the low quality. It's just yet another developing country being used for sweatshops by western capital. "The Chinese" didn't make it bad, western capitalists made it bad but in China

A camper

Here you go, a moving home

Not very modern, isn't it :)

A company made a 100 year light bulb. That company went out of business. How many can you sell before no one needs to buy any more?

Function runs the gamut of temporary use to prolonged reliability. Like disposable latex gloves, vs winter gloves in wet or dry conditions.

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My fav example is with vacuum cleaners. At first, when everyone just beat the dirt out of their rugs, vacuum companies had to convince people to buy it. They had to be easy, effective, and worth having. Once vacuums became the standard, companies didnt need to worry about quality, they needed to worry about a steady flow of customers. Someone who buys 1 vacuum that lasts 50 years isn't going to be as much profit as someone who has to buy a vacuum that craps out every 3 years.

As someone who lives three blocks from a Harbor Freight I can tell you that you can sell people literal landfill and they will buy it if it's half the price of the competitor.

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A company that tries to hit all market demographics. High end quality for those that need or desire the best. And those that just want the brand.

There are probably still companies out there that manufacture theee best. Can’t afford it or work hard enough for it? It ain’t for you.

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Problem in a capitalist society is incentive : most companies are just willing to sell more. We could for example have a renting system for most appliances : oven, fridge... The incentive will then be to have durable things and quality, so the customer keeps paying and the maker doesn't have any repair to do.

Also, right to repair should be mandatory with a steady supply for replacement pieces. Standardisation for phone batteries, chargers, should also be a thing. Open source OS for end-of-life products.

I suppose you would need to make it your corporate identity to attract the smaller demographic willing to pay more for more durable stuff. Kind of like brands who advertise how they use materials or methods that protect the environment. First brand to come to mind is Eastpack, who hve a pretty lengthy warranty.

A lot of people are just throwing around planned obsolescence and the intent to make you replace things every x years or so. But I think those are just happy side effects of other contributing factors that are at play...

So no company has ever started out saying, let's make a product that is just good enough to last until our next one comes out. They start out trying to make the best, the best thing they can possibly make to break into the market. For example let's say a company want to make a toaster. They have to compete with other already existing toaster companies so they have to build a better more robust toaster that maybe even costs a little more than the competition, but they can get away with it because they can market it as a well built premium toaster. So years go on and their toaster is selling pretty well and sales start out pacing production because they are slicing market share from the competition toaster as they eventually break and customers switch brands to one that is more durable. So the company has to figure out a way to make more and more toasters, in the same amount of time, you can speed up the assembly lines, but that might affect quality as workers have to work faster and might make more mistakes. You could make a second assembly line, but that is very expensive because you have to effectively double your factory footprint. Either option also creates more demand for your upstream suppliers. If you require more parts from them, they also have to make the same decision you just made, work faster or expand. Even if you dictate that whatever they do they have to maintain the same level of quality of parts the supply, they may increase piece prices on you. So ultimately, the decision comes down to, decrease quality, or increase price. You can increase price in some situations, and maintain the quality, but at some point the market can only bear price increases to a certain point and it will collapse. Usually the safer and chewper option is to take the quality hit and pay to repair or replace the units that make it out defective.

Now, at some point the company will reach an equilibrium where demand and production levels out. This is where the problems with capitalism start making their way in. If the company is publicly traded or has investors that want infinite money, they aren't going to be content just existing I'm this steady state where they just churn out toasters and make a small but reliable stream of money. They see a flat line of profit as losing. So in come people looking to either chop heads on the assembly line, or cut costs of raw materials. Both reduce quality in various ways and over enough iterations this is how products decline in quality over years. I think planned obsolescence comes into play here, but I think most of the time that is just a side effect of iterations of cost reduction over many years. I think it very rarely comes up in meetings or is actively done in product designing.

I used to work for a company that made consumer products. At the beginning of the product cycle, the marketing people would tell us they needed, say, a $4.99 item, a $7.99 item, 2 $14.99 items and a big $49.99 item. That comes from the retailers. From there, everything is developed to meet that price point and the required margins for us and the retailer. I’ve literally sat in meetings where they cut out the one thing that made the product special just to save a nickel on the ex-factory cost. Then they wonder why it didn’t sell.

The price bump is more like pay 300% more for BIFL quality

So you want a company to willingly make a product they make 25% more profit on but instead of customers having to buy another one within a year, they buy another one in 4 years? Do you see why this is a bad business model?

I’m not saying I disagree, but given your post here I think you understand why they do it. A company needs profits to compete. If everyone buys a product that lasts forever, you eventually run out of customers.

Planned obsolescence isn't a thing. It is a myth.

I am an engineer and I know dozens of other engineers across multiple industries. None has ever been asked or told to make things fail faster.

Even your own example doesn't really work: the lighting industry moved from incandescent to LED despite LED lasting much much longer. According to planned obsolescence that cannot happen.

It doesn't even make sense: if I have something that breaks immediately after buying it, why would I go out and buy from the same manufacturer? It just sends people to their competitor.

You can also find long-lasting appliances or whatever without issue. Again, planned obsolescence says that shouldn't happen either.

I'll give a simpler explanation: most consumers just don't care about durability as much as they say they do.

Here's a fun experiment you can do: ask a friend of yours how much they would be willing to pay for X appliance that lasts 20 years. I guarantee that number will be well below what that kind of appliance actually costs.

My wife's family thinks I'm insane for much I spent on my appliances even though I tell them it will last until I'm retired. And they are not poor.

Durability/longevity are one of those things that people talk about but never put their money where their mouth is.

Then why can you buy long-lasting appliances?

You can absolutely quality stuff. It just costs a lot more and you have to know whatvto look for.

Most manufacturers know that people want the most features for the lowest cost, which is the opposite for durability. But there are still plenty that do the opposite.

What are you looking for?

Oh this is where I can shine. Design/manufacturing engineer.

So the three variables are materials, processes, and tolerances (design and employee skill are the 4th and 5th but we’ll leave that alone).

Cheap stuff have cheap materials and generous critical tolerances. They also skip some processes that contribute to quality (aka-reliability, but that’s a slippery topic).

Hard work...and property.

It’s not as simple as that. You’re having some shitty manufacturing across the world it’s hard to say hey let me pay more for higher quality… they’re gonna say sure absolutely and make the same thing, or maybe not. They do it because there is a market for the cheapest product regardless of quality, so why bother if their target customer doesn’t care.

Harbor freight tools vs one of the professional brands.

I still buy harbor freight for tools I’ll barely use… like the giant socket to change my lower fuel filter… I only use it once a year, I’d rather spend 4.00 than 40.00

I won't buy a house less than 10 years old. It's not planned obsolescence, but there is a lot of shitty construction in same flavor as "the cheap version is just as good".

Massachusetts has some decent Right To Repair laws, but it's pretty much alone. It's one of the few ways you can get a Tesla repair manual right now: by being a Masshole.

And let's go one step further: most consumers don't know whether the thing they're buying is durable. Sticking "durable" on the package is dirt-cheap. Actually making durable things is expensive. I'd guess that almost every consumer has, at some point, bought a thing they thought was durable, but it wasn't. Learning whether a product is durable generally takes some decent research about brands and products, and whether a particular brand just got bought by someone who just changed their quality to be much worse. We all have stories about how "X used to be good, but then they started making crap products."

So part of the question is "how durable does the consumer think this product is?" And if the consumer can't know, then you fall back on price again.

Engineering to a price point seems to be mistaken for planned obsolescence often.

It's a little bit China's fault. Because of competition between the Chinese manufacturers, it's not uncommon for a particular factory to underbid the price, produce exactly the requested good for a while, and then start quietly cheapening the design so that they can finally start making a little money.

It's why, if you're going to manufacture your goods in China, you need to regularly inspect the factories.

But, yes: the other problem is that China makes some cheap things cheaply because that's exactly what they were asked to do.

OK boilerbuttslut, let’s hear about those appliances.

Pretty much.

It's always the same story: "well this fridge from 1973 worked fine for over 40 years!"

Yeah, and that fridge cost the equivalent of $2k and would be considered super basic today. Buying a giant one with fancy features everywhere for less than $1k means that they had to cut corners somewhere.

Which ones?

Ok so my original point was too narrow. It's not western capitalists, it's all of them

Favorite?

Miele dishwasher.

Miele owners will always make sure to notice a Miele appliance in someone else's house and mention it. It's kind of a cult.

My general rule is determine what features you want first. Like what features do you want as a minimum that would make you happy for whatever you buy. Then find the cheapest appliance with those features.

Then take that price and multiply it by 2-3x. That's the actual range you can expect for a durable model with those features.

It's not a perfect rule but it gets you in the general neighborhood.

But in general you will not find durability at low cost. That is a fiction.

No company made a century bulb. That was never a thing.

What you see are regular bulbs that the owner runs at really low voltage which makes the filament not burn out. They barely put out the same amount of light as a candle.

You can do the same thing with modern incandescents.

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Some of this perspective isn’t true, but the survivor bias of what’s still around.

Was there cheap crap offered and sold back then? Of course! But it broke and went in the garbage. Same as now, what’s left are the things that happened to keep going and/or have such a massive stockpile as to still allow replacement parts to be found.

Sort of an aside, sort of on topic, but suppose light bulbs were supplied by the power company as part of the service. You’d visit the utility office and exchange burnt out bulbs for new ones, for a $2 (1978 dollars) yearly subscription. That’s the world my parents (born 1930s) lived in until the service stopped in 1978 because a store owner sued the utility. My parents would complain about the low quality bulbs they had to buy in the stores, that were never as good as the ones from the utility.

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/26/archives/free-light-bulb-program-in-detroit-switched-off-upheld-in-supreme.html

The price differences are not as small as you think. And there are bigger product cycle economies in play than just manufacturing cost. Then most people would in many cases go for whatever is cheaper. The price one can very clearly see - how the product is going to hold up in use one can’t.

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Ignorance is not a substitute for facts

Centennial Light Bulb

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Counterpoint - old (reliable) vacuums weighed a friggin ton. Grandma would call you up to come over and carry the vacuum upstairs so she could clean the top floor. As houses went multi-story, lighter vacuums became the hot item. They were made out of steel, now plastic.

They are even lighter now, because how else are you going to eat a bag of Cheetos when you vacuum. Consumers drive poor quality through buying behaviors, not manufacturers.

I know all about it.

It has lasted this long because they have a 60W (or whatever) bulb running at 4W. You can do that just as easily with any new incandescent and also make it last hundreds of years. It will just be barely as bright as a candle just like the centennial light is.

The carbon filament garbage the article talks about has nothing to do with it.

I think about this every time I use a spray bottle I bought at Target. They decided to use as small of a screw on connector as possible and as a result, if you hold the bottle by it's fucking handle when it's full, it's likely to disconnect because of the weight of the liquid is too much for the fraction of a turn they decided to make the screw part.

As a grown ass adult, I have used countless spray bottles over my lifetime. Everything from ones specifically bought to numerous products that come in spray bottles. I have never had any one of those other bottles come apart because I picked it up by the handle. I have never spilled an entire bottle of cleaning fluid because the company was so fucking cheap they didn't want to spend the extra few pennies to use an adequate amount of plastic to make a functional product.

I still have this bottle because I hate wasting things and don't want to create additional waste. But every time I use this product and the handle comes off I curse the name of Target and their penny pinching bullshit of making your customers suffer to generate extra profit. Did they really need to squeeze out those pennies? Couldn't they have just passed the cost on to me? Did they not realize how spilling a few dollars worth of cleaning product because of a improperly cheap product pisses people off? Did they not realize I would immediately see the little Target logo on the bottom of the bottle each time it happened and blame them? They spend so much money to advertise and make me associate good things with their brand. Why did they make something so horrible it would fail to do something so basic?

It doesn't make any sense to me.

Often making a quality long lasting product isn’t as simple as spending a few pence more on higher quality parts or materials as most parts in say a drill are made specifically for that tool, not off the shelf.

High quality brands invest millions in teams to design, research and test these items not to mention a long established brand has had time to evolve their product, this is factored into the final cost. A new manufacturer or budget one often won’t have these resources, they know the principles of how a drill works, they have seen other drills but they can’t afford to test it to the same level or spend so much on r&d so they do their best check it works and sell it. Problem is later the failure is usually some small part of the design which unfortunately didn’t get enough development and testing to fix. Could be a power transistor which couldn’t deal with long term use and fails after a year of regular use, could be a button that can’t deal with so many actuations or insufficient cooling when used in certain temperatures or environments. Point is the aspects are tested and sorted by high end brands often costing nothing to manufacturing as it may just be another equally priced component or having a better fan blade design.

Materials are one thing, tolerances and failure probability is the real cost sink. Sure nicer materials cost more money but getting that fit down to a micron of tolerance or getting a failure rate down to six-sigma is an extremely expensive prospect to mass produce.

Depends - is/was the sound quality good, or even adequate? People might tend to go for a known "good", even if short-lived, rather than experiment with an unknown brand, or even a well-known brand but one they haven't had any experience with.

BIFL is cheaper in the long run, but more costly up front, and we have a failing capitalist system where few people have much money, but also many people want "instant gratification" and are unwilling to do without and save until they can afford BIFL. The toaster in my kitchen is from 1952. It costs the average working person in the "United" States a weeks pay. Our vacuum in from 1970, and costs the average worker a month's pay. Hard to imagine the broke, and yet entitled, and impatient person today buying stuff like that.

Companies figured out long ago that people look at cost #1 and features number #2.

They are in no way rewarded for making something that cost a little more with less features that lasts longer.

​

I have had a basic GE fridge for well over a decade. No ice maker, defrost cycle, or water dispenser. It is a 15 cubic food side by side and has wire shelves. I needed to purchase new door gaskets for it. I spent a few under $200 12 years ago on it.

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I have replaced the compressor once and ice maker twice on my modern LG french door fridge that is 7 years old. It cost about 2000. When I get a new one... it;s going to be the same because the family uses the convenience features. the same ones that make it break.

Houses are built as poorly as legally permissible. The builder is LONG gone by the time something is sold. Production builders spend a LOT of money to design and build houses to EXACTLY the legal minimum.

There is a new building product that is pretty much fancy cardboard that can replace standard housing sheeting. With siding over it and drywall behind it you can't tell it's not wood.

It absolutely is a thing. Actually the lighting industry came together in the past and agreed upon a limit as to how long a bulb should last...

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Engineers are not being told to make thing fail faster. I promise you that is not a thing.

The only proof anyone can ever come up for it is the dumb "phoebus cartel" thing from the 30s. No other proof is ever offered. It also conveniently ignores that you could still buy long life bulbs during that time as well, which planned obsolescence says shouldn't be possible. And as mentioned, which you still didn't address: the lighting industry universally moved to LED. Those last way longer. Planned obsolescence says that's impossible.

The "cartel" was to make a consumer standard: you cannot have both long life AND high brightness bulbs. Those two goals contradict each other. 1000 hours was decided as a compromise, but as mentioned, you could still get 5k or 10k hour bulbs: they were called rough service or commercial. They were also noticeably less bright for the same power hence why they weren't popular.

The idea doesn't even make sense: why would consumers go back to buying the same thing that just broke on them? Like, if I have a washing machine that breaks after 6 months, why on earth would I go out and buy the same thing? The only way this idea ever works is if you have a full monopoly on that item. Otherwise it is just driving people to their competitors.

Alongside monopoly there's something called oligopoly too

If there is some kind of collusion, then that is a clear and provable anti-trust violation, and anyone at any of these companies can make a lot of money being a whistleblower.

Yet somehow no whistleblower ever seems to show up. No proof is ever offered.

And for the oligopoly idea to work, you feel full cooperation between everyone. As soon as one company doesn't play along the whole thing falls apart.

Since there are indeed no shortage of long-lasting choices, that leads me to think this isn't really a problem.

>I guess I wonder. If you go to the trouble of making anything, why not spend just a little more to make it a quality product? Again, I know money. What I mean is, does it really cost that much more to make the product last for a long time? Its like they are running a race and give up at 85% of the way. Just go the rest of the way.

It's a business model. And a strategy.

Bad analogy on my end but think about hamburgers. You can pay very cheap prices for a McDonalds cheeseburger. It's cheap, it's low quality meat but there's a market for it. On the other hand there's a place that uses high quality meat, high quality ingredients and really spends the time to make a burger.

Some companies profit off of high quality. Others churning out low quality to those who don't want to spend much money.

A sleeping bag, a dirt-cheap one, will cost you about $35 on Amazon. A very good one will cost you $600++. The key difference being that the more expensive one is lightweight, can keep you warm in 20 degree F weather and will not break apart.

You see this even with microphones. Chinese companies tend to come up with cheaper components and have very poor quality microphones like the Neewer 800. It's a $20 cheap microphone that's terrible - but it serves a purpose. Then you have on the far end of quality, German microphones, ie Sennheiser, Neumann etc and those are made of high quality materials producing the absolute best in studio sound. But some people don't see the justification in spending $1000 for a Neumann TLM 103 and would rather opt for a $20 Neewer mic. It's different markets catering to different dollars.