- Planned Obsolescence and Business Practices
The actual business practice most closely associated with twentieth century planned obsolescence was General Motor’s annual automobile model changes. GM’s policy began in the 1920s, as a competitive strategy to outflank Ford, which had committed itself to a very diferent philosophy of design. Ford’s approach to industrial production was to build standardized and quite undiferentiated cars, with an emphasis on value and durability. Not only would the five-dollar-per-day wage policy, instituted in 1914, ensure that Ford workers could aford to purchase the products they made, but the products themselves would also be constructed in such a way as to provide what was considered to be a very respectable duration of use for their owners. A rough equivalence between work and the wage was thereby established, with standardized production-line labor exchanged for standardized wages that could be converted into standardized consumer commodities that indexed predictable durations of free activity under standard conditions of use. This suggested a reasonable, rather than a capricious or exploitative, circuit of use value, with the use value represented by work exchanged for working consumer products that at least notionally represented a roughly equivalent amount of use value. In this sense, Ford’s approach was very much in accord with the moral framework of industrial corporatism.
Although the sense in this arrangement seemed self-evident to Henry Ford, Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors, suspected that certain social and psychological forces could be mobilized to outflank Ford’s business strategy. The yearly model changes Sloan introduced, and the associated marketing campaigns, took advantage of a complex and imbricated set of structural conditions, psychological dynamics, and cultural concerns, including segmentation of social identity along lines of gender and class, status anxiety, and neophilia. The marketing strategy proved to be quite successful, eventually forcing Ford to give up its single-minded focus on function and durability in favor of GM’s strategy of planned obsolescence. In 1932, Ford introduced yearly model changes.
Moral Panic about Utility
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