But most commonly, planned obsolescence was seen, in the spirit of Packard, as one part of a concerted strategy on the part of big business to exploit the consumer. The set of nefarious practices that made up this strategy, listed in a Washington Post article from 1964, include; “declining product standards, phony retail list prices, planned obsolescence, hidden credit card charges, fraudulent packaging, misleading advertising and labeling.” The accusatory title of the article (addressed to the reader), “It is partly your fault,” clearly accords some measure of blame to consumers, for being complicit in their exploitation by business. But the argument of the piece is not that consumers are guilty of weakness of will for letting themselves be exploited but rather that by abandoning the project of organized consumer resistance, individual consumers had become isolated and had thereby rendered themselves vulnerable to business manipulation.30
There was some conjecture that the notional conspiracy to impose planned obsolescence on an unsuspecting consuming public explained how product guarantees work. A common suggestion was that the material failure of a consumer durable was timed to occur just after the expiration of its guarantee. A comment in one newspaper article notes that “it’s pretty well established, at least in the minds of suspicious persons, that household appliances and automobile accessories have an uncanny way of expiring the day after the guarantee runs out. In fact, it’s a little awesome to contemplate the know-how obviously required to achieve this built-in mortality. The economists call it planned obsolescence. The idea behind it is that when a washing machine conks out the owner will have to buy another.”31 Similarly, a Washington Post piece on planned obsolescence, from 1969, quotes a housewife voicing suspicions about engineered “death dates” in her appliances. “I am beginning to believe in the charge of ‘planned obsolescence’ that has been directed at the manufacturers of appliances, particularly kitchen equipment,” she declared, noting that her appliances failed “apparently on schedule” and that the cost of repair makes replacement seem the more attractive option.32 It was perhaps partly in response to the popular suspicion that product warranties measure product lifespan that some manufacturers began to ofer “lifetime” warranties, which, as discussed in Chapter 7, became increasingly common in the middle decades of the century.33
Moral Panic about Utility
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