- Packard’s Polemic and Its Echoes
While the modern practice of style obsolescence in industrial design was closely associated with GM’s annual model change, it was, as noted earlier, Vance Packard’s polemical journalism of the late 1950s that popularized the term planned obsolescence. In The Waste Makers, published in 1960, Packard argued that planned obsolescence represents a conspiracy on the part of business to short-change consumers by making products less durable than they could be, or by encouraging consumer behavior that would in efect reduce use-value per dollar spent, thereby reducing the quantity of use value aforded by the wage (its purchasing power). This was accomplished, Packard suggested, by designing products with “death dates” and by manipulating consumers into buying items because they had features that were superficially novel, but functionally redundant.
The argument was not without precursors. One of Packard’s main inspirations (according to Packard himself) was a journalistic piece, published in 1930, but written just before the Wall Street crash of 1929, by literary critic Kenneth Burke. Burke (1930, 1956) did not use the term planned obsolescence in his essay, but the ideas expounded (partly tongue in cheek) therein are very similar to those later developed by Packard.9 The economist Paul M. Gregory likewise presented ideas similar to Packard’s in a 1947 paper entitled “A Theory of Purposeful Obsolescence,” published in the Southern Journal of Economics. Like Packard, Gregory delineated the diferent forms of obsolescence and suggested that planned obsolescence is dictated by the logic of industrial capitalism. Perhaps taking his cue from the timing of Ford’s adoption of style obsolescence, Gregory argued that prior to 1930, model changes had indicated real product improvements but that after that year, changes in design were no longer driven by improvements in function but rather were a marketing ploy. He explained the change as a consequence of demand saturation, which led to the need to generate “false needs” for product replacement in the consuming public.10 The argument received some notice outside narrowly academic circles, becoming the subject of a Washington Post article in 1948. The article focused on Gregory’s suggestion that model changes were no longer a response on the part of manufacturers to actual changes in taste but rather were driven by the need for industry to “make room for new models.”11
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Time for Things