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consumers would trade up for style as much as for technological improvements long before their old cars wore out. He convinced his team to restyle the body covering of what was essentially a nine-year-old piece of technology under the banner of ‘product innovation’. The Chevrolet was a remarkable success and the idea of ‘perceived obsolescence’ and ‘change for change’s sake’ was born. Obsolescence was now built not just into the product itself, but into our minds. GM went so far as to define its strategy as choreographed cosmetic ‘upgrades’ to ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied’. In 1929, Charles Kettering, director of research for Sloan, wrote an article declaring, ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction. . . . If everyone were satisfied no one would want to buy the new thing.’³⁷ This cry became an increasingly popular concept as companies realized they no longer had a production problem but rather had a demand problem. They needed to shift their attention to finding new ways to sell existing products.

      For fifteen years Ford showed a fanatical dedication to sticking with the Model T’s original design (with the exception of a few minor changes). In 1922, he proclaimed, ‘We have been told . . . that the object of business ought to be to get people to buy frequently and that [it] is bad business to try to make anything that will last forever. . . . Our principle of business is precisely to the contrary. . . . We never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete.’ Ford maintained consumer demand by competing on costs, bringing the price of the Model T down from $950 in 1909 to $290 by 1924 through the efficiencies and scale made possible by the assembly line.³⁸ But by 1927, with most families who could afford one owning a car, the increasing competition of GM’s lavish and continual design ‘improvements’ and the rumblings of the Great Depression, this strategy faltered. After the 15 millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line, production halted, and cars such as the Model A and V-8 with multiple different styles of models were born. Henry Ford lost the battle to obsolescence.

      The efficiencies of mass production only grew during World War II. Goods rolled off assembly lines faster than they could be consumed, jamming warehouses. As Vance Packard writes in the The Waste Makers, ‘The challenge was to develop a public that would always have an appetite as voracious as its machines.’³⁹ Advertisers called the time between when a product was made and when that product was purchased by the consumer ‘time lag’. To reduce that gap, manufacturers induced people to buy more and more products, faster, and to create desire even when customer needs were already met. Perceived obsolescence, making products feel out-of-date, less desirable, and in need of replacement, was a strategy mastered by the car makers, but it was not enough. Consumers still controlled their desires to update or upgrade. Manufacturers needed to take this decision out of their hands.

      Designing for the Dump

      In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, the aging salesman with an unwavering devotion to the American dream, laments, ‘Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it is broken! I am always in a race with the junkyard!’ His outburst continues, ‘The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddamn maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you’ve finally paid for them, they’re used up.’ Willy was experiencing the pains of ‘death dating’, the idea of deliberately building into the product different ways to shorten its life, carefully controlled by the manufacturer.

      Planned obsolescence was a concept first suggested not by an economist, a manufacturer or even an advertiser, but by a Manhattan real estate broker. In 1932, Bernard London wrote a twenty-page pamphlet called ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’. London proposed starting a government agency that would determine the ‘lease of life’ of every manufactured product, be it a car, a hair comb, a ship or even a building. After the allotted time expired, ‘these things would be legally dead.’ Consumers would have a choice: they could give up the item, and be paid part of the price of a new one, or use the product past its ‘expiration date’ and pay a penalty tax. While the regulatory details of London’s concept were not enforced, the principle of the proposal was adopted by product designers in the fifties who started to ‘design for the dump’.

      During the twentieth century, the average human life span in the United States increased by more than thirty years, twenty-five years of which are attributed to advances in medicine and public health.⁴⁰ In contrast, over the last fifty years, the life span of everyday ‘durable’ goods including refrigerators, toasters and washing machines has decreased anywhere between three and seven years. In 1901, Shelby Electric Company produced an incandescent ‘Centennial’ lightbulb. The original, more than one hundred years later, still lights up the fire station in Livermore, California, where it was first installed. In contrast, in 1932, a memo circulated at GE stating, ‘We should change the life of the 200-watt 110–120 volt PS 30 bulb lamp from 1,000 hours . . . to 750 hours.’⁴¹ GE, like many other companies, shortened the life span of its products to increase sales.

      Just One More Factor

      For many families today, the idea of owning one television is as odd as having, say, just one pair of shoes. In 2004, both America and the UK crossed a telling threshold: the average home had more televisions in it than people (there are on average three sets in the typical home and 2.55 people).⁴² As a person is unlikely to watch two televisions at once, how did we end up being convinced that we need more than one television per person in our homes?

      In the late 1950s, industrialists were worried. The Smiths had caught up with the Joneses. A degree of mass affluence meant that the average American family (and much of Europe) was satisfied with what it had, owning a home, new appliances and a car. Markets for goods were getting saturated while consumer demand was slowing. Social commentator Vance Packard summed up this phenomenon when he noted, ‘The way to end glut was to produce gluttons.’⁴³ Manufacturers needed people not simply to want to keep up with the Joneses, but as Gregg Easterbrook wrote in The Progress Paradox, to have a desire to ‘call and raise the Joneses’.⁴⁴ Given that most people had one of everything, consumers needed a plausible excuse to buy ‘just one more’ of a product they already owned, and so the surplus doctrine of choice was born.

      Psychologist Jonathan Haidt conducted a simple experiment that we can re-create here. Pick a word from the following list most appealing to you: constraint, limit, barrier, choice. Odds are that, like the participants in the research, you picked ‘choice’, as the first three have negative associations.⁴⁵ We often believe as consumers that the more choice the better, even if it is more of the same. And this feeling relates not just to the hundreds of thousands of brands we have to choose from every day, but also to which car to drive, television to watch and phone to call on, and even which bathroom to use. As psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have shown in books such as the The Paradox of Choice, choice confuses us not only about how to satisfy our wants, but about what those wants are. This uncertain disorienting effect is what manufacturers wanted to create. If we don’t feel satisfied, satisfaction may be just one more purchase away. By 2005, according to Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and half days.⁴⁶

      The more our houses and lives bloat with stuff, the heavier and more trapped we feel. As Neal Lawson wrote in All Consuming, ‘The more we consume the less space we have to be anything other than consumers.’⁴⁷ Similarly, the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people. Our drive for material wealth entailed the exclusion of our most basic social needs, such as family and community bonds, personal passions and social responsibility. We thought we could fill these needs through shopping and buying and accumulating more and more stuff. Some critics describe our era of hyper-consumerism as ‘autistic capitalism’. Regardless of nomenclature, we know two things about this disorder of hyper-consumption. First, it was driven by a belief that money – and the almost instinctual accumulation of what money can buy – equalled happiness. The second thing we know is that this disorder is fixable. The system of consumerism may seem like an immovable fact of modern life. But it is not. That the system was manufactured suggests that we can reshape those forces to create a healthier, more sustainable system with a more fulfilling goal than ‘more stuff’.

      Chapter

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