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

In 1928 her husband coined the phrase ‘progressive obsolescence’, and a year later Christine took on this idea wholeheartedly in her book, Selling Mrs. Consumer. It might just as easily have been called Selling Out Mrs. Consumer, for part of it was a guide on how companies could manipulate women’s insecurities, vanities and natural feelings of motherly or sexual love to persuade them to consume at an increased rate.

Christine’s main message was that the public should embrace ‘progressive obsolescence’, which involved developing:

‘(1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open; eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living.

(2) A readiness to “scrap” or lay aside an article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing.

(3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one’s income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living.’

In short, she encouraged her readers to become highly suggestible people willing to spend above their means, upgrade regularly and throw away perfectly useful items – something she called ‘creative waste’.

She saw materials as ‘inexhaustible’, and so professed, ‘There isn’t the slightest reason why they should not be creatively “wasted”.’ She scoffed at the Europeans who ‘buy shoes, clothes, motor cars, etc., to last just as long as possible’:

‘That is their idea of buying wisely. You buy once and of very substantial, everlasting materials and you never buy again if you can help it. It is not uncommon for English women of certain circles to wear, on all formal occasions, the same evening gown for five or ten years. To us, this is unheard of and preposterous. If designers and weavers and inventors of rapid machinery make it possible to choose a new pattern of necktie or dress every few weeks, and there is human pleasure in wearing them, why be an old frump and cling to an old necktie or old dress until it wears through?’

I suppose in Christine’s mind this brands me and anyone living a life less throwaway as a ‘preposterous old frump’. I wonder if we can get that put on a (lifetime-guaranteed) T-shirt?

THE THREE STAGES OF CREATIVE WASTE

Or, ‘Meet the Consumer Jones’s’

Christine describes how the three stages of creative waste work, using a radio as an example:

• Her perfect family, ‘the Consumer Jones’s’, start out by updating their radio set up to twice a year as it gets technically better. This is the ‘technical’ phase.

• Next is the ‘practical’ phase, where they throw out their radio and buy an integrated product such as a radio in a desk.

• Finally, they throw that out and buy a new product purely for how it looks. That is the ‘aesthetic’ phase.

What does this mean for us today and how should we act in these three phases?

The technical phase

Christine makes a valid point here in that we do need some people to be willing to take a chance on new technology so that it can progress. If a product is getting technically better, upgrading is a natural result. However, now we’re aware that resources are not, as Christine described them, ‘endlessly replenishable’, I feel we need to demand that tech companies do more in the technical phase. They should design products with upgradable or modular parts and products that can be dismantled, repurposed and recycled easily.

The practical phase

I take issue here with buying something purely to combine two objects, such as a desk with a radio. I think that complicating your furniture by embedding pieces of tech in it is a sure-fire way of forcing yourself to throw away your furniture! The more complicated you make an object, the more there is to go wrong with it. This phase, in my opinion, will cause more problems than it claims to solve.

The Aesthetic Phase

Getting people to discard perfectly working products because they were no longer seen as beautiful was the real masterstroke of psychological obsolescence. Manufacturers started to tweak the look of their products just enough every year to make purely useful things fashion items too. These products then became unfashionable within a few years.

This trend started in car design and then quickly moved into home design and appliances. A new model would come out and suddenly people’s pride in the old model was reduced. It was particularly noticeable in cars, as they were parked on the street, where all the neighbours could see them. The American car was soon considered to be a ‘kind of motorised magic carpet on which social egos could ascend’.

The manufacturers would say that the public demanded these constant style changes, but in fact the public had been trained to expect them by the manufacturers themselves. As Charles Kettering, head of research at General Motors, famously wrote, his job was to make people dissatisfied with what they had already.

However, while all the other car manufacturers were tweaking the designs, one company bucked the trend. The VW Beetle looked exactly the same from 1949 to 1963. In fact, the company ran an advert celebrating the fact. Called the ‘VW Theory of Evolution’. It showed every identical-looking car with its year number, lined up in neat rows. Underneath was written:

‘Can you spot the Volkswagen with the fins? Or the one that’s bigger? Or smaller? Or the one with the fancy chrome work? You can’t? The reason you can’t see most of our evolutionary changes is because we’ve made them deep down inside the car. And that’s our theory: never change the VW for the sake of change, only to make it better. That’s what keeps our car ahead of its time. And never out of style.’

As VW shows here, there is an alternative way for successful companies to behave if they choose to take it.

REASONS FOR WASTEFUL BUYING

Before the twentieth century, people didn’t naturally switch their possessions before they were worn out, so reasons had to be invented to get us to change things on a regular basis. To be fair to Christine Frederick, she did say that changes to products should not just be for change’s sake, but ‘for the sake of increased knowledge of taste, color, line, efficiency, better workmanship, health, hygiene and fitness’. Let’s pick these reasons apart.

Taste, colour and line

If a designer comes up with new colour schemes and shapes which the media proclaim to be ‘good taste’, is this a good reason to change what we have?

I would say it isn’t, as taste is in the eye of the taster. You simply can’t say someone has ‘better taste’ than someone else. That would be like saying someone’s preference for vanilla ice cream was better than someone else’s preference for strawberry.

Our preferences can change over time, of course, which is why it’s important to dig deeper into our true taste when we choose our products in the first place. More on this later, but for now, let’s carry on with Christine’s list of reasons to chuck out our stuff.

More efficiency

‘More efficiency’ is something to strive for, but unless the product in question is a vehicle, appliance or insulation, this isn’t a reason to jettison what we already have. Also, we’ve come to the point now where energy-efficiency improvements in appliances have plateaued, so unless your current model is very old or polluting, it’s always better environmentally and financially to hold on to the one you have. The carbon and money you’d save with the more efficient model would be wiped out by the energy and money needed for the new purchase. If you want to buy something new based on efficiency, wait for the great leaps forward that happen less often, such as moving to solar energy.

Better workmanship

Changing products regularly is a sure-fire way to undermine good workmanship, and sadly, workmanship standards have been proven to decline when we get into the habit of obsolescence. This is partly due to a decrease in the price and an increase in mass production and partly because there’s no point in putting proper craftsmanship into objects that will be thrown away in a couple of years.

Improved health and hygiene

This is a common marketing ploy for new household products. Companies have done a great job of convincing us that every cranny and surface in our homes is crawling with dangerous microbes. However, much of this fear-mongering is simply to sell us things. For example, washing your hands with normal soap and water is just as effective as the antibacterial soap sold at jumped-up prices.

In the twenty-first century, we bleach and disinfect everything in sight, but just as we all have ‘good bacteria’ in our gut, we also need them on our skin for it to function properly. There is also evidence to suggest that our over-clean homes aren’t allowing our children’s immune systems to develop properly. Kids who grow up on farms and are subjected to the widest range of bacteria show significantly reduced levels of asthma.

Nowadays kitchenware and bathroom accessories are often sold as being more hygienic, but as long as basic hygiene is used, such as washing your hands after using the bathroom and making sure that anything touching raw chicken is washed thoroughly, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get sick from the natural microbes that live in the house. Sterile isn’t something we should be aiming for. For a healthy life, cleanish is clean enough.

Medical innovation is to be encouraged; however, when it comes to health, while a couple of innovations such as car safety and less polluting cookers have had a big impact, I’d recommend turning a deaf ear to the health and fitness industry’s insistence that we need heaps of equipment, supplements and gadgets. We actually require very little to be healthy. Varied unprocessed food, clean water, clean air and a decent amount of activity. Done.

Better fitness

Here, I think Christine means a product that is more ‘fit for purpose’ or more ‘convenient’, and I acknowledge that we want innovations to make products better at what they do.

However, a huge amount of ‘innovation’ around convenience is also change for change’s sake, and much of the innovation overcomplicates products that worked wonderfully in their simplicity. I have an engineer friend for whom this is a personal gripe: ‘A toaster doesn’t need to be able to do your tax return, it just has to make bread warm and a bit brown on each side.’ But often companies will add extra elements to products to justify a higher price tag and to make their product seem new and different from previous models.

My instinct is that most of the time these ‘innovations’ aren’t needed. To prove this to myself, I tried to imagine what my life would be like if all consumer product innovation had stopped in the Thirties, just after Christine’s book came out. Would life be unbearable, or even that different? Not at all. Almost everything in my home would be just as good, if not better, for being made in the Thirties. The only things I think I would miss are the kitchen appliances and boiler, the hoover, my laptop, phone, electric toothbrush and car. Around twelve items. That’s paltry when you think of all the products that have come out since the Thirties. How many of them truly do their jobs better?

HOW TO FIGHT PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSOLESCENCE

Recognise it and call it out

Christine might claim not to have encouraged change for change’s sake, but this is precisely what happened once the idea of psychological obsolescence took hold.

One of the little-understood effects of psychological obsolescence is described by Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things. He explains in essence that designers are under pressure to bring out something that looks different every year, so they never get to perfect their creations and make them the best they can be. They have to start from scratch each time so that something different is seen on the shelves.