In Praise of Shoddy Products
The average family will spend about $1000 on Christmas gifts, and much of what we buy might be described as rather shoddy. It is prone to break and wear out. Kids' gifts might not last the day. Our new clothes might not make it to next season. Our electronic stuff might break down in a year. Our kitchen gadgets might snap and break. Household gifts of all sorts just aren't what they used to be. The spines of our books will snap, our yard equipment will need replacing by summer's end, and our tools will break rather than last generations as our granddad's did.
Many commentators have noted that kitchen appliances, and many other things, just don't seem to last the way they used to. In the old days, you got a blender as a wedding gift and your daughter would use it when she came home from college. These days we are lucky if a blender or hand mixer lasts a few years. The same seems true of washers and dryers, lawn mowers and edgers, clothing, electronic equipment, and even homes.
Some people blame China, others Wal-Mart, others the web, and still others just think it is a sign of the times when civilization is sinking into a hole in preparation for Armaggedon. Regardless, that this trend is awful is rarely questioned. So let us question away.
Paradoxically, this is not a bad thing but a sign of rising wealth. It is a sign of prosperity that we prefer the new to the repaired. As consumers, we show a preference for throwing away and replacing rather than being stuck with a dated gizmo or unfashionable item. What's more, our preference for shoddiness over durability is not wasteful at all, but merely a reflection of the market's ability to adjust to consumer demand with resource supply. In making ever more shoddy products manufacturers are doing what is best for all of us.
To begin to understand why, consider that in a thousand years, the pyramids will still be standing but your subdivision will likely be long gone. Does this indicate that the ancient world was a better and more prosperous place because it made structures that will last and last? Clearly not. Durability is only one value among many competing values in the production and consumption process, and it is very likely to decline in the order of priorities as wealth increases.
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If your book falls apart, your clothes collapse in tatters, and your washing machine suddenly keels over, resist the temptation to decry the decline of civilization. Remember that you can replace all these items at a fraction of the price that your mom or hers bought them. And you can do so with minimal fuss and trouble. And it is very likely that the new versions of the old products that you buy will have more bells and whistles than the old.
You can call this planned obsolescence if you want to. It is planned by producers because consumers prefer improvement to permanence, availability to longevity, replaceability to repairability, motion and change to durability. It is not waste because there is no eternal standard by which we can measure and assess the economic rationality behind the use of resources in society. This is something that can only be determined and judged by individuals using resources in a market setting.
Of course a person is free to live in a drafty stone house, listen to music on a Victrola, wash clothes with a washboard, tell time with a sundial, and make one's clothes from flour sacks. Even now this is possible. One is free to be completely obsolete. But let us not equate this status with wealth, and let us not aspire to live in a society in which everyone is forced to prefer the permanent things to the cheap, improving, and widely available things.
