In order to track the discussions around planned obsolescence, and the shape of the moral disturbance created by fears about the practice, I analyzed newspaper articles in which the term appeared in a set of major regional and national newspapers in the United States, paying particular attention to the period between 1932 (when the term first appeared) and 1975. I take the mid-1970s to roughly mark the end of the Golden Age era of capitalism (Marglin and Schor 1991). The set of newspapers includes the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, New York Post, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam Times, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Atlanta Daily World. In these publications between 1930 and 1975 there were 469 pieces in which the term planned obsolescence appeared. In addition, I analyzed especially influential magazine articles and books about planned obsolescence—for example, Vance Packard’s seminal discussion of the topic, and pieces by prominent figures such as J. K. Galbraith, Marshal McLuhan, and Viktor Papanek. I also looked at discussions about planned obsolescence in the business and finance literature, in professional and trade journals, and tracked the concept in the academic and para-academic literature, especially in economics. Lastly, I examined company reports about planned obsolescence as a marketing strategy, or as an objective in product development, and looked at advertisements that invoked planned obsolescence. As well as following discussions about planned obsolescence, I tracked cognate terms, such as death dating, psychological obsolescence, dynamic obsolescence, and progressive obsolescence.
I treat this quite diverse collection of sources as a reasonably representative sample of discourse about planned obsolescence. In consulting this material, I had two objectives: first, to reconstruct the array of issues at stake in the idea of planned obsolescence and, second, to note how concern about the issue ebbed, flowed, and changed in nature over time.
- Overview of General Trends
Some sense of the waxing and waning of the concern about planned obsolescence over the course of the twentieth century is given by breaking down the number of articles in which the term appears by decade in a sample of four major national dailies: the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The numbers are as follows:
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