Planned obsolescence: winter of the tastemakers

High-tech consumer durables have a reputation for falling apart. But planned obsolescence does not account for the problems of repair.

For three weeks this winter I have endured the most appalling agony. First, my middle‑market Philips car stereo quite reasonably decides to chew up a rather battered old rock tape. Then I bring the machine in for mending, but that takes an age. I have to fight through London’s jammed but lonely streets for a full 20 days with­out music as a friend.

Rapid repair of defective consumer products, it appears, has become a dying art. For at just the moment that my car has turned from roving juke­box to mobile morgue, I gain an in­satiable desire to get my Hitachi tape player at home fixed; and that operation, too, is beset by interminable delays. With my three-year-old piece of Philips in‑car entertainment, I only have what quaintly translated instruc­tion manuals call ‘tape spaghetti’, complicated by the need for a trivial missing part that never arrives. By contrast, my Japanese ghetto‑blaster – black, aggressive, up‑market, manu­factured around 1981 – has a faulty gas­-operated tape loading mechanism, a dead power switch and a gnawed‑at microphone. Repair, I am told, will take two or three months.

Many Japanese consumer elec­tronics companies do have rather poky after‑sales counters at their massive UK HQs near Slough. But Slough is too much of a trek to make just to get a ghetto-blaster fixed; so I go, on Hitachi’s recommendation, to a dealer on London’s Tottenham Court Road. There two repairers are ill and on holiday. They will do an estimate and that alone will cost me, whatever I decide to do. Late on a wet Friday night, I meekly agree.

The following Monday the Zanussi dishwasher collapses. ‘Can we send an engineer on Friday?’, Zanussi asks my wife on the phone. Only when she insists on Wednesday is that agreed.

This is a contest we win, for Zanussi does indeed show up on the appointed day, and rehabilitates our machine within minutes by removing an errant part from the pump. Nevertheless, I am nervous. The Christmas before last, I had to play the ‘I am a journalist and I demand to speak to the marketing director’ card to AEG. That was over our washing machine. The company told me then that it had had to recruit extra ser­vice engineers to deal with Yuletide demand. It was hard to raise an answer from AEG on the phone and our youngest’s dirty clothes soon assumed mountainous proportions.

Though all our household’s basic life support systems once again appear near a Challenger‑style ‘major malfunction’, we decide to buy an AEG gas oven. But just then our 14­inch Panasonic Quintrix television gets white lines running over it like the running track at the Seoul Olym­pics. This time we use Yellow Pages: a local man and his son come round and manage to right it, in our home, for £22, then take it away when it goes wrong, and finally bring it back per­fect. For a further £10, they fix every­thing and, in a now highly unfamiliar symbol of personal service, attach the plug to the telly by doing the necess­ary high‑exertion wire-chasing behind our bookcase. Total bill: £33.

According to our TV repairers. today’s video cassette recorders, hi-fi sets and the like last longer than in the past. But when they do go en panne, the properly working part replacing the defective part now has too many integrated circuits on it to be inexpensive any more. Worse, the rate of new product development in manufactur­ing is now so rapid that spare parts, even for popular products, can fall out of stock within as little as 18 months. What’s really happening, the repairers argue, is that manufacturers are delib­erately making their wares impervi­ous to resuscitation. The reason: this way, they hope to encourage more re­placement sales in the future.

These hassles surrounding pro­fessional surgery on consumer goods are of some moment. As con­sumer expenditure slows under Chan­cellor Lawson’s squeeze, more and more people will find themselves un­able to swap kit that’s kaput for the working variety. There will be more attempts by the lay public to patch up appliances at home, and thus, we may conjecture, more living room electro­cutions, soldering iron burns, fingers frazzled in fan belts. Men, it is true, may go on buying Motorola car phones, Sanyo twin-speed VCRs, Hita­chi computer speed controlled shavers with rhodium foils, Philips picture-in-­picture Grandstand. But even they will find breakdowns hard to reverse. As for women vacuuming, cooking and washing with products in the home – Britain’s enormous, unseen, unpaid economy of women doing housework – their lives may gradu­ally grind to a halt.

At this point you might well ask, nimbly: ‘Doesn’t all this hassle with product repairs amount to just a new form of planned obsolescence?’ Can’t the techno-economic unmendability of objects, like the tendency for their aesthetics to go out of style – can’t these things be laid at the door of the modem‑day design consultant, con­spiring with manufacturers to rip innocent consumers off?

Perhaps. But after 12 years in de­sign, I’ve yet to find such a conspir­acy. Designers are usually too pressed for time, too idealistic to have a confab with their clients about when the pro­ducts of their labour at the drawing-­board or CAD screen should fall to bits.

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Consider a little history. The term ‘planned obsolescence’ was first popularised by the American muck‑raking journalist Vance Packard in his hilarious book The Waste Makers (1960). Packard stressed that planned obsolescence was essential for high consumption that, in turn, was essential if America’s heavily automated factor­ies and offices were to keep up demand for their wares. In a US of booming productivity, the recession of 1957-58, the worst of three since the war, served to remind everyone of the pivotal role of consumer expenditure, as inventories soared, overcapacity mounted and unemployment became ‘worrisome’. Planned obsolescence, Packard argued, was a response to this.

The significance of Waste Makers is that today’s consumer products operate in a completely different en­vironment. They last longer, are becoming cheaper and – in contrast to what Packard criticised in the pro­ducts of 1960 – often contain some genuine feature innovations. More im­portantly, British consumers today are not recovering from a mini‑re­cession in the midst of a successful (‘hyper‑thyroid’) production economy. On the contrary, we are entering a renewed recession. The context for today’s irreparable pro­ducts is, therefore, much bleaker than that surrounding the gleaming finned Cadillacs of General Motors’ chief stylist Harley Earl, a major enthusiast for what he called ‘dynamic obsol­escence’.

In Packard’s account, evil waste­makers like Earl joined furniture designer George Nelson and the marketing guru Theodore Levitt in upholding the mer­its of a throwaway culture. But the old hack’s case was always less sen­sational than he made out. Earl had, with his boss Alfred Sloan, been pio­neering planned obsolescence since the late 1920s – through GM’s policy of annual model changes. Moreover, in retrospect we can now see that Packard’s America was never as automated and thus plagued with overproduction as he made out. Last, even if some designers were at fault, Packard had to admit that giants like Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Tea­gue and Gordon Lippincott all said no to planned obsolescence.

Today, we may be certain, there is still little planned obsolescence. It is just that products go wrong, and that our expectations are high. Still, something needs to be done: for a start, we could do with more experiments in self‑diagnostic fault dis­plays on products, and with clearer guides to owner repair.

Why does something need to be done? Because Packard wrote at a time when America was reaching her sunny peak. Because here in gloomy winter Britain, we have designers, but no repairers – so that when your car radio or dishwasher gives up the ghost, you really suffer.