Planned Obsolescence

What is Planned Obsolescence?  We tend to view it as something businesses do to make us buy more of their product.  It is worth looking at formal definition:

A manufacturing decision by a company to make consumer products in such a way that they become out-of-date or useless within a known time period. The main goal of this type of production is to ensure that consumers will have to buy the product multiple times, rather than only once. This naturally stimulates demand for an industry's products because consumers have to keep coming back again and again.

Products ranging from inexpensive light bulbs to high-priced goods such as cars and buildings are subject to planned obsolescence by manufacturers and producers.

Investopdia

So as we suspected, Planned Obsolescence is a way to get customers and consumers to buy ones products on a more frequent basis.  There are two ways this can be done per the keywords “out-of-date” and “useless” in this definition.  

One way is to have the products become useless.  They simply wear out or break and have to be replaced.   This is what consumers thought the US Auto Companies were doing in the 1960s and 70s.  The cars simply did not last.  Their performance degraded to the point the repair costs justified investing in a new car. They rusted.  They rattled.  They broke.  People accused the Auto Companies of having a Planned Obsolescence strategy.

This was not the case.  They came out of World War II with a monopoly.  They made lots of money no matter what they did.  The industry suffered from what monopolies suffer, complacency, bloatedness, and, most importantly, politics over customer focused product innovations and improvements.  People did not have a choice until the Japanese entered the market with cars that cost less, required less repairs, and lasted longer.  You know the rest of the story.

The second kind of Planned Obsolescence is where the product becomes useless not because of quality but actually because of innovation.  This is the case in consumer electronics and Apple is the company that is generally thought of as the masters at this.  iPhone and iPad 2’s still work, they are fully functional (though if the batteries go they are hard to change).  These do exactly what they were designed to do.  They are not functionally useless, yet people want the latest and greatest features and functionality hence rendering these products as old and useless.  Every year or two new products come out and because they are superior to existing products in the eyes of consumers, they gladly replace their perfectly good products.

It has come to our attention  lately that two product classes in white goods, namely refrigerators and water heaters, have design and quality related issues that necessitate replacing them more often than they used to.  Is it Planned Obsolescence?  If it is, it is the kind that irritates consumers and makes this market vulnerable to better manufacturers.  Water heaters are replaced every six years now.  Refrigerators need replacing every 8 years.  These estimates are not statistical but rather anecdotal.  We attribute this phenomena to the 1960s style automotive style of Planned Obsolescence i.e. poor design and poor quality.  A freon leak necessitates the replacement of refrigerators while a water leak requires the replacement of the a water heater.  Reliability is not what it once was and neither products are repairable.  

We vote for reliability and excellent product design.