a modern stove designed and built to last a hundred years would be too expensive. It would take a bigger engineering effort (fixed cost) and probably more/better materials (variable cost). And it’s totally unnecessary.
I’m a bit skeptical about this point. It seems reasonable to avoid focusing all the effort into designing a very long-lived stove, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn about someone who did the very opposite (intentionally designing short-lived stoves even if some minor modifications would have had large impact on their lifespan). I agree that new items are generally better than old items in many ways, but Planned obsolescence is a thing. According to Wikipedia, in 2015 the French National Assembly established jail terms of up to two years for manufacturers planning the failure of their products. Knowing this, I would strongly suspect that some manufacturers do plan the failure of their products. To me, this seems less like positive continual upgrading and more like Moloch...
For one thing, why would I believe any manufacturer that made this claim?
It’s one thing for very old companies that already are known for longevity and also provide very long warranties, like, say, Le Crueset or Cutco. That’s a believable signal built over generations.
But for anyone else, claiming to have increased durability is cheap talk unless it’s accompanied by a long-duration and thorough warranty, and a reputation for not making the use of existing warranties unpleasantly difficult and frustrating, and some way of assuring me that that state of affairs will continue. (As a personal example: I have a GE gas stove bought in 2014, and whatever the situation was before, GE sold their appliance division to Haier in 2016, and customer warranty service got dramatically worse, as attested by several of the 11 customer service agents and 3 technicians I talked to in 2018 to get a replacement for a busted igniter (which is extremely easy to diagnose and fairly quick to replace, I knew what was wrong before the first call and the first customer service rep assured me the first tech would have the part with him when he arrived, but alas).) In any case, a credible signal of durability isn’t just a design/engineering/QA expense, it’s a deeper corporate infrastructure and organizational expense, and one that is really hard to believe in a world where companies constantly buy and sell divisions of each other, and change executives and strategies, and deal with constant external shocks of various sorts.
Actually, there is one way I can think of top-of-mind that might convince me a company really had engineered for longevity: if the product automatically came with a fully prepaid long-term replacement cost coverage insurance policy from a highly regarded, long-lived third party insurance company. Maybe one that states clearly that if the product breaks (other than usual act-of-god etc. exceptions), and can’t be fixed within, say, three attempts over a one month period, the policy pays out, no other exceptions. And it needs to be transferrable—what’s the use of a long-lived stove if the next owner of my house can’t benefit from the policy? For an actually durable product, this would be cheap to implement, otherwise not so much.
I have the same problem with clothing, but worse. Sam Vimes was wrong, or would be in the modern world. My clothes last about the same number of wash cycles, and have about the same chance of coming clean when I spill things on them, whether I buy a brand of shirt that has a $10 MSRP or a $100 MSRP. And with manufacturing so much cheaper than labor these days, repair of an expensive item, like resoling a shoe, can easily be several times more expensive than an entirely new but cheaper shoe. Especially if I am patient and wait a few weeks or months to buy it on sale when it predictably goes on sale. Actually, I buy most of my t-shirts these days at Michaels (the craft store): comfortable, no logos or tags, wide range of color options, cost less than $4, similar lifespan to every other shirt I have bought in the last decade.
The point in your last paragraph is important and worth emphasizing.
It is often said (as, indeed, in several comments here) that yes, perhaps the new cheap stuff is bad in various ways, but you can always pay more and get good stuff! But in many cases, that is simply false: you cannot pay more (for any even remotely reasonable values of “more”) and get good stuff, because what you get if you pay more is simply the same bad stuff but with more fancy features (or the same bad stuff but from a name brand, or the same bad stuff but with a superficially elegant design, etc., etc.).
Let’s say I look at some inexpensive thing and say: “This does everything I want; alas, it is unreliable, prone to breaking or otherwise failing, is of a poor build quality, does not quite perform to specifications, etc. I would like a thing that is no more ‘advanced’ than this—no fancy features, no exotic accessories, nothing more than what this cheap one’s got—except that it should be good; it shouldn’t break easily, it should be of a superior build quality, it should reliably perform as advertised, etc.”
Nine times out of ten, this desire will never be satisfied. Your choices are “cheap crap” or “expensive crap”.
If you know that the cheap thing will break, and the expensive thing has a 50% chance of being solid and a 50% chance of being the cheap thing in disguise in a way that you can’t immediately tell the difference before the sale, the expensive thing looks far less attractive… which in turn means it’s less likely to be sold, and places making an expensive solid product end up doing worse. (But places making an expensive cheap thing in disguise still do well.).
(To which the common response is “just look at reviews/brand history/etc”, and the common counter-counter response being to note that just because the version sent to reviewers was good/the brand used to be good doesn’t mean that the version in front of you is good.)
(To which the common response is “just look at reviews/brand history/etc”, and the common counter-counter response being to note that just because the version sent to reviewers was good/the brand used to be good doesn’t mean that the version in front of you is good.)
That would be a good counter-counter response in a (slightly) more reasonable and sane world than ours, yes. In our actual world it’s actually much worse than that; the response in reality is more like “the brand history means very close to nothing because of rampant extreme short-term thinking, the reviews are likely to be fraudulent/shills/etc., and sometimes the reviews you’re shown are for an entirely different product but you won’t be able to tell because this fact is intentionally obfuscated, and just in general the sellers have every incentive to make it maximally difficult for you to acquire accurate information about the market and the products in it, and no one is able and willing to make them behave honestly”.
I haven’t researched planned obsolescence; are there any good examples of this?
If extra durability/lifespan (beyond the ~15 years that things already last) were possible with a small increase in cost, why wouldn’t manufacturers compete on this axis? I imagine that individual homebuyers don’t care that much, but, say, a landlord of a large apartment complex who was making a major purchase of stoves would probably want to optimize for 15 vs. 20 or 25-year lifespans. They would have someone doing the calculation.
The cartel’s grip on the lightbulb market lasted only into the 1930s. Its far more enduring legacy was to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. By early 1925, this became codified at 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb, a marked reduction from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had previously been common. Cartel members rationalized this approach as a trade-off: Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer. In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence.
I don’t think the reason for planned obsolescence is that it saves expenses designing products this way. Sometimes, they design appliance so that a small part breaks after a specific time (not too long after the warranty expires). This requires special effort.
I think the problem, for the manufacturer, of making durable products is that you’re succeeding your way out of business. If consumer’s needs are met for the decades to come, then there’s no need to make more products. We live in an economy were it’s not products that are made to meet consumer’s needs, but consumer’s needs that are shaped (through marketing) to meet production. That’s the definition of a consumer society I was taught: growth is driven by consumption.
One thing this comment makes me want to highlight is that sometimes shaping consumers “needs” is a good thing.
Sometimes the consumer doesn’t know that this crazy new invention will actually make their life (or maybe just their descendants’ lives) better. After all, horses/no-electricity/no-computers all served me just fine thank you very much!
If extra durability/lifespan (beyond the ~15 years that things already last) were possible with a small increase in cost, why wouldn’t manufacturers compete on this axis?
Because Moloch. If at least one major manufacturer add extra lifespan, that forces the others to compete. But the real profit-maximizing move for major manufacturers as a whole is to conspire into selling short-lived stoves.
As for examples, one of my favorites is this (Samsung printers programmed to stop working after a fixed number of prints). The Wikipedia page linked in my first comment contains other examples.
Because Moloch. If at least one major manufacturer add extra lifespan, that forces the others to compete. But the real profit-maximizing move for major manufacturers as a whole is to conspire into selling short-lived stoves.
Why would Moloch (the metaphorical God for “coordination problems are hard”) be the appropriate metaphor for conspiracy?
Right, “conspire” was the wrong word (as others have noted, information asymmetry is enough, and I don’t think that manufacturers literally gather in smoke-filled rooms to adjust the lifespan of their products). But I still think Moloch to be a valid metaphor for a situation where:
customers are forced to buy short-lived products
manufacturers could unilaterally prolong the lifespan of their products at a small cost (or even a small gain), but they choose not to because they want to sell more now
long-lived products could be sold at higher prices
I’m not even sure that it’s such a competitive move for a company to make. Sure, you might get to sell more at the start, but then everyone has their long-lasting products and there’s no demand, so you too are stuck. It’s a viable option only if you never supply enough to satisfy demand (say, you’re a small business that constantly gets new customers, just not many), otherwise it’s a bad long term strategy.
I don’t think any conspiracy is necessary, just information asymmetry. For example, suppose modern stoves are controlled by microchips, and microchips can be programmed to self destruct after X hours of use. The manufacturer can choose any value of X, and the consumer has no way to determine the value of X. Since every broken stove represents a new potential customer, (and especially when the largest “competitor” is stoves that are already installed and the user is happy with rather than new competing products,) each manufacturer has an incentive to choose the smallest value of X that the consumer will tolerate without resorting to extreme measures (e.g. living without a stove, or politically banning self-destructing chips). The consumer cannot “vote with their wallet” since each manufacturer faces the same incentive and will arrive at a similar value of X. Manufacturers also have an incentive to spread memes which encourage people to accept even smaller values of X, such as this very post.
Even if conspiracies are necessary (though I agree with clone of saturn that they probably aren’t) and even if the conspiracy can’t survive, it can usually survive for some amount of time and during this time many people become a victim. Couple this with the fact that there could be many conspiracies across many different products.
So, if you accept that these conspiracies exist, and my points above are true, it doesn’t seem too crazy to think that the average consumers house is full of products with planned obsolescence.
If extra durability/lifespan (beyond the ~15 years that things already last) were possible with a small increase in cost, why wouldn’t manufacturers compete on this axis?
I’ll offer a slightly different take on this. Namely: there’s no reliable way to communicate this to customers at a decent lag time, so the actual price premium customers are expected to pay for this is too low to be worth it.
Warranty periods only matter given:
1. People are confident that the company will be around for the duration. 2. People are confident that the company will honor them. 3. People don’t mind the time/annoyance of potential warranty calls. 4. Warrantee periods are correlated with actual time-to-failures.
Unfortunately, 1 and 2 are not really possible now. Say you put out a new product with a 25y warranty. And you have a fund put aside to deal with failures. Great! Only… it’s a 25y warranty . That’s a long timespan. How do you protect against the next CEO running things into the ground? Or spinning off that small segment into a separate company with not enough of a fund due to “optimistic” estimates and then having that portion go bankrupt?
And meanwhile someone else will also put out a product with the same 25y warranty, where say 25% of products will fail within 10-15y and they are banking on people not to actually return them, and hence they can sell them cheaper. And so you get outcompeted on price.
I’m a bit skeptical about this point. It seems reasonable to avoid focusing all the effort into designing a very long-lived stove, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn about someone who did the very opposite (intentionally designing short-lived stoves even if some minor modifications would have had large impact on their lifespan). I agree that new items are generally better than old items in many ways, but Planned obsolescence is a thing. According to Wikipedia, in 2015 the French National Assembly established jail terms of up to two years for manufacturers planning the failure of their products. Knowing this, I would strongly suspect that some manufacturers do plan the failure of their products. To me, this seems less like positive continual upgrading and more like Moloch...
For one thing, why would I believe any manufacturer that made this claim?
It’s one thing for very old companies that already are known for longevity and also provide very long warranties, like, say, Le Crueset or Cutco. That’s a believable signal built over generations.
But for anyone else, claiming to have increased durability is cheap talk unless it’s accompanied by a long-duration and thorough warranty, and a reputation for not making the use of existing warranties unpleasantly difficult and frustrating, and some way of assuring me that that state of affairs will continue. (As a personal example: I have a GE gas stove bought in 2014, and whatever the situation was before, GE sold their appliance division to Haier in 2016, and customer warranty service got dramatically worse, as attested by several of the 11 customer service agents and 3 technicians I talked to in 2018 to get a replacement for a busted igniter (which is extremely easy to diagnose and fairly quick to replace, I knew what was wrong before the first call and the first customer service rep assured me the first tech would have the part with him when he arrived, but alas).) In any case, a credible signal of durability isn’t just a design/engineering/QA expense, it’s a deeper corporate infrastructure and organizational expense, and one that is really hard to believe in a world where companies constantly buy and sell divisions of each other, and change executives and strategies, and deal with constant external shocks of various sorts.
Actually, there is one way I can think of top-of-mind that might convince me a company really had engineered for longevity: if the product automatically came with a fully prepaid long-term replacement cost coverage insurance policy from a highly regarded, long-lived third party insurance company. Maybe one that states clearly that if the product breaks (other than usual act-of-god etc. exceptions), and can’t be fixed within, say, three attempts over a one month period, the policy pays out, no other exceptions. And it needs to be transferrable—what’s the use of a long-lived stove if the next owner of my house can’t benefit from the policy? For an actually durable product, this would be cheap to implement, otherwise not so much.
I have the same problem with clothing, but worse. Sam Vimes was wrong, or would be in the modern world. My clothes last about the same number of wash cycles, and have about the same chance of coming clean when I spill things on them, whether I buy a brand of shirt that has a $10 MSRP or a $100 MSRP. And with manufacturing so much cheaper than labor these days, repair of an expensive item, like resoling a shoe, can easily be several times more expensive than an entirely new but cheaper shoe. Especially if I am patient and wait a few weeks or months to buy it on sale when it predictably goes on sale. Actually, I buy most of my t-shirts these days at Michaels (the craft store): comfortable, no logos or tags, wide range of color options, cost less than $4, similar lifespan to every other shirt I have bought in the last decade.
The point in your last paragraph is important and worth emphasizing.
It is often said (as, indeed, in several comments here) that yes, perhaps the new cheap stuff is bad in various ways, but you can always pay more and get good stuff! But in many cases, that is simply false: you cannot pay more (for any even remotely reasonable values of “more”) and get good stuff, because what you get if you pay more is simply the same bad stuff but with more fancy features (or the same bad stuff but from a name brand, or the same bad stuff but with a superficially elegant design, etc., etc.).
Let’s say I look at some inexpensive thing and say: “This does everything I want; alas, it is unreliable, prone to breaking or otherwise failing, is of a poor build quality, does not quite perform to specifications, etc. I would like a thing that is no more ‘advanced’ than this—no fancy features, no exotic accessories, nothing more than what this cheap one’s got—except that it should be good; it shouldn’t break easily, it should be of a superior build quality, it should reliably perform as advertised, etc.”
Nine times out of ten, this desire will never be satisfied. Your choices are “cheap crap” or “expensive crap”.
Imperfect information is rather important here.
If you know that the cheap thing will break, and the expensive thing has a 50% chance of being solid and a 50% chance of being the cheap thing in disguise in a way that you can’t immediately tell the difference before the sale, the expensive thing looks far less attractive… which in turn means it’s less likely to be sold, and places making an expensive solid product end up doing worse. (But places making an expensive cheap thing in disguise still do well.).
(To which the common response is “just look at reviews/brand history/etc”, and the common counter-counter response being to note that just because the version sent to reviewers was good/the brand used to be good doesn’t mean that the version in front of you is good.)
Yes, this is an important point.
That would be a good counter-counter response in a (slightly) more reasonable and sane world than ours, yes. In our actual world it’s actually much worse than that; the response in reality is more like “the brand history means very close to nothing because of rampant extreme short-term thinking, the reviews are likely to be fraudulent/shills/etc., and sometimes the reviews you’re shown are for an entirely different product but you won’t be able to tell because this fact is intentionally obfuscated, and just in general the sellers have every incentive to make it maximally difficult for you to acquire accurate information about the market and the products in it, and no one is able and willing to make them behave honestly”.
Anyway, yes, I agree with your overall point.
I haven’t researched planned obsolescence; are there any good examples of this?
If extra durability/lifespan (beyond the ~15 years that things already last) were possible with a small increase in cost, why wouldn’t manufacturers compete on this axis? I imagine that individual homebuyers don’t care that much, but, say, a landlord of a large apartment complex who was making a major purchase of stoves would probably want to optimize for 15 vs. 20 or 25-year lifespans. They would have someone doing the calculation.
The Phoebus Cartel
I don’t think the reason for planned obsolescence is that it saves expenses designing products this way. Sometimes, they design appliance so that a small part breaks after a specific time (not too long after the warranty expires). This requires special effort.
I think the problem, for the manufacturer, of making durable products is that you’re succeeding your way out of business. If consumer’s needs are met for the decades to come, then there’s no need to make more products. We live in an economy were it’s not products that are made to meet consumer’s needs, but consumer’s needs that are shaped (through marketing) to meet production. That’s the definition of a consumer society I was taught: growth is driven by consumption.
One thing this comment makes me want to highlight is that sometimes shaping consumers “needs” is a good thing.
Sometimes the consumer doesn’t know that this crazy new invention will actually make their life (or maybe just their descendants’ lives) better. After all, horses/no-electricity/no-computers all served me just fine thank you very much!
Ink Cartidges
Apple deliberately lowing down phone processors
The planned obsolescence Wikipedia page has more examples, I suggest reading it. Exploring the what links here page can probably bring more specific examples.
Because Moloch. If at least one major manufacturer add extra lifespan, that forces the others to compete. But the real profit-maximizing move for major manufacturers as a whole is to conspire into selling short-lived stoves.
As for examples, one of my favorites is this (Samsung printers programmed to stop working after a fixed number of prints). The Wikipedia page linked in my first comment contains other examples.
Why would Moloch (the metaphorical God for “coordination problems are hard”) be the appropriate metaphor for conspiracy?
Right, “conspire” was the wrong word (as others have noted, information asymmetry is enough, and I don’t think that manufacturers literally gather in smoke-filled rooms to adjust the lifespan of their products). But I still think Moloch to be a valid metaphor for a situation where:
customers are forced to buy short-lived products
manufacturers could unilaterally prolong the lifespan of their products at a small cost (or even a small gain), but they choose not to because they want to sell more now
long-lived products could be sold at higher prices
I’m not even sure that it’s such a competitive move for a company to make. Sure, you might get to sell more at the start, but then everyone has their long-lasting products and there’s no demand, so you too are stuck. It’s a viable option only if you never supply enough to satisfy demand (say, you’re a small business that constantly gets new customers, just not many), otherwise it’s a bad long term strategy.
How does the conspiracy survive when each individual member has a motivation to defect? (Not saying it can’t, I just don’t understand the dynamics.)
I don’t think any conspiracy is necessary, just information asymmetry. For example, suppose modern stoves are controlled by microchips, and microchips can be programmed to self destruct after X hours of use. The manufacturer can choose any value of X, and the consumer has no way to determine the value of X. Since every broken stove represents a new potential customer, (and especially when the largest “competitor” is stoves that are already installed and the user is happy with rather than new competing products,) each manufacturer has an incentive to choose the smallest value of X that the consumer will tolerate without resorting to extreme measures (e.g. living without a stove, or politically banning self-destructing chips). The consumer cannot “vote with their wallet” since each manufacturer faces the same incentive and will arrive at a similar value of X. Manufacturers also have an incentive to spread memes which encourage people to accept even smaller values of X, such as this very post.
Even if conspiracies are necessary (though I agree with clone of saturn that they probably aren’t) and even if the conspiracy can’t survive, it can usually survive for some amount of time and during this time many people become a victim. Couple this with the fact that there could be many conspiracies across many different products.
So, if you accept that these conspiracies exist, and my points above are true, it doesn’t seem too crazy to think that the average consumers house is full of products with planned obsolescence.
I’ll offer a slightly different take on this. Namely: there’s no reliable way to communicate this to customers at a decent lag time, so the actual price premium customers are expected to pay for this is too low to be worth it.
Warranty periods only matter given:
1. People are confident that the company will be around for the duration.
2. People are confident that the company will honor them.
3. People don’t mind the time/annoyance of potential warranty calls.
4. Warrantee periods are correlated with actual time-to-failures.
Unfortunately, 1 and 2 are not really possible now. Say you put out a new product with a 25y warranty. And you have a fund put aside to deal with failures. Great! Only… it’s a 25y warranty . That’s a long timespan. How do you protect against the next CEO running things into the ground? Or spinning off that small segment into a separate company with not enough of a fund due to “optimistic” estimates and then having that portion go bankrupt?
And meanwhile someone else will also put out a product with the same 25y warranty, where say 25% of products will fail within 10-15y and they are banking on people not to actually return them, and hence they can sell them cheaper. And so you get outcompeted on price.