A Life Less Throwaway: The lost art of buying for life

When it breaks

• Let us at BuyMeOnce know. We’re aiming to build up the biggest database in the world on how long products last.

• Tell the company that you’re dissatisfied and write an online review telling others how long that product lasted for you.

• Support your local fixers who still have the skills to mend things. We need more of these people.

• Have a go at mending yourself. (See Appendix I: Care and Repair for advice.)

When buying

• Seek out products that are reviewed independently as lasting longer and those that come with the best warranties.

• Ask a local repairer which models they recommend.

• Buy locally whenever possible to avoid overseas factories with less rigorous standards.

• Vote for durability with your wallet by buying BuyMeOnce-approved products and we’ll soon see more companies upping their game.

• Ask how long a company keeps spare parts for and what the most common repair is, and consider buying that part in advance.

When they strip the quality

• Showing companies that you care about longevity is the key to getting it. Ask about it and talk about it on their social media. Be annoying! It’s often the best way to make change happen.

• Sign the BuyMeOnce pledge, letting companies know that you’d be willing to support them if they made products that were built to last. This will give them the confidence to change their policies.

• Look at independent reviews to see if the build quality has gone down. You can find these at Which?, Consumer Reports, the Reddit ‘Buyitforlife’ thread, BuyMeOnce and Amazon. Check the most up-to-date reviews for any evidence of fading quality. The good news is that people tend to be rather vocal when things don’t meet the standards they were expecting.

• Support innovative companies that want to do better. If you see a gap in the market, either consider filling it yourself, if you’re feeling inventive, or tell BuyMeOnce about it and we’ll put it out as a challenge.

• Support the makers and craftspeople who have a real connection to their products. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter help us because they allow engineers and makers to go straight to the customer without retailers or marketers in between. This means engineers who want to make longer-lasting products can offer them to the public, and if we like the idea, it may well get funded.

When they make their products unfixable

• Vote with your wallet and look for fixable modular versions of products. For example, a Fairphone can be taken apart and upgraded easily.

• If you have a product that needs fixing, visit your local Restart Project or Repair Café, or start your own group through online sites such as meetup or Facebook. If you haven’t repaired a product before, seek an expert’s advice first. Some products are perfectly repairable by a civilian; however, electricity is serious stuff, so do your homework and use parts approved by the manufacturer if possible. (For more on repairs, see Appendix I: Care and Repair.)

THE BUYMEONCE #MAKEITLAST CAMPAIGN

At BuyMeOnce we’re campaigning to get companies to tell us how long they expect their products to last and to make the best products possible. Products, rather like animals, evolve over time – features that are successful and useful, like a long neck in a giraffe or a long handle on a frying pan to stop burns, should get taken on by the next generation until the design is perfected.

But then money and trends come in and rather muck things up. Instead of making the ultimate frying pan, companies concentrate on making the cheapest frying pan. What we end up with is something that will serve as a pan for a few months but soon dies. Imagine if the giraffe got the same treatment …

A board meeting at Giraffe-makers, Inc.

‘Right,’ says the product developer. ‘So we’ve worked out that halving the length of neck will take costs down by 15 per cent per giraffe.’

The board members smile and nod to each other.

The head of engineering chimes in nervously, ‘But then … then it won’t be able to eat from the top branches during droughts.’

‘So?’ asks the CEO.

‘So it will starve in a year or so … as soon as the rains fail.’

The head of engineering winces.

‘Yeah, but, like … it’s still a giraffe until then, isn’t it? I mean, we can still advertise it as a giraffe, can’t we?’ The head of marketing lolls her head sardonically to one side and stares at him until he looks away.

‘And,’ points out the CEO, ‘if they fail earlier, people will just have to buy another one!’

‘And we could make them stripy,’ chimes in the designer. ‘Stripes are going to be huge next year.’

When shoppers were asked what their top motivation was for buying a product, price and style came out top. Longevity wasn’t even on the radar.

This is partly because most manufacturers don’t want it to be on the radar. If they did, you could be sure that every box would shout about how long you could expect the product inside to last. This is exactly what we’re campaigning for at BuyMeOnce.

Imagine going to buy an appliance and having a clear idea of how long it would last. It would immediately be obvious which items were the best value over time. Please join us on this mission by signing the #makeitlast petition at change.org (http://www.change.org) or reaching out to us at BuyMeOnce.com (http://www.BuyMeOnce.com).

Clearly, planned obsolescence isn’t as simple as mysterious people in white coats putting mythical ‘kill chips’ in our blenders to stop them from working the day after the warranty expires. It’s subtler and more insidious. Still, I believe it can be overcome and we can drastically improve the quality of what we are sold if we employ some of the tactics above. The fightback begins here.

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Psychological Obsolescence (#ulink_78a931dd-cc67-5231-9886-c96331b14948)

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While rummaging through our rubbish, a group of academics found that of the household objects thrown away, on average 40 per cent were beyond repair and 20 per cent needed fixing, but a whopping 40 per cent were still perfectly functional.

So we can’t blame all our waste on shoddy product design or irreparability. Something else is also at play here – psychological obsolescence – and it doesn’t play fair.

Psychological obsolescence is a technique used by companies to persuade us to replace the products we own, even if they still work perfectly well. Over the last few decades companies have conditioned us increasingly to see things as temporary and throwaway. They keep us obsessed with the new. They keep us excited, but it is a cheap, short-lived excitement, as the products we adore on purchase start to shift in our affections. This chapter explores the forces that set this in motion and what we can do to combat it.

THE MOTHER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE

Several men have been given the rather dubious honour of being titled ‘the father of planned obsolescence’, including King Gillette, inventor of the disposable razor, J. Gordon Lippincott, who praised the economic benefits of obsolescence in his book Design for Business, and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr, president of General Motors, who pioneered the idea of slightly updating the look of cars every year. Finally we have General Motors designer Harley J. Earl, who said in 1955, ‘Our job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934, the average car ownership span was five years; now it is two years. When it is one year, we will have the perfect score.’

All these men played their part. However, planned obsolescence also has a mother, and she’s rather intriguing.

When Christine Frederick was born in 1883, her father apparently cried, ‘Horrors! Why, it’s only a girl!’ It wasn’t a promising start, but this girl grew up to be energetic, bright and imposing-looking, even in sepia. She gained a degree, and public power through her prolific writing and speaking, at a time when most women had neither. Sadly, she then used this rare female freedom to argue that a woman’s place was in the home … being a consumer.

Both Christine and her husband were in the advertising game. George Frederick was a busy boy, revolutionising the way advertisers wrote, promoting the use of psychology in ads and having several extra-marital affairs.

Christine meanwhile conducted scientific research in her own housekeeping facility – we have her to thank for all kitchen counters being the same height – and became a writer for The Ladies’ Home Journal, covering everything from economic and commercial theory to ‘Frankfurters as You Like Them’.