Warranties were also regarded as suspect on the somewhat diferent grounds that they were a means of protecting companies that practiced planned obsolescence, by foreclosing the possibility of legal recourse for frustrated consumers. An article entitled “Falling Apart Is the Name of the Game” begins with a typical indictment of the supposedly widespread practice of planned obsolescence: “Modern manufacturers are constantly coming up with new and better ways to make what we buy fall apart faster. Planned obsolescence is the name of the game, an exciting race to see who can come up with the first thingamabob that’ll self-destruct the instant it’s unpacked!” The author goes on to issue a warning against signing warranty cards, on the grounds that by doing so consumers waive their legal right of protection in cases where goods have been compromised by planned obsolescence. “The law can’t protect you, however, if you’ve signed a ‘Warranty’ like the one from Suckers-Only, which is really a promise that you won’t ask Suckers-Only to obey the legal standards of ‘Merchantibility.’”34
The temporality of credit, like that of the warranty, was similarly suspected of being tied to compromised product durability. “Let not the lure of credit / your innocent heart beguile / By the time the thing is paid for / It’s worn out and out of style,” we are warned in a light-hearted piece by Ralph Freeman of the Los Angeles Times.35 In a 1967 article on Jimmy Hofa, the infamous leader of the Teamsters union, a passing comment expresses a similar sentiment: “The final payment on the automobile will bring the sound of engine parts falling to the street in the dead of night.”36 Suspicion was also expressed that product service plans were part of the overall strategy of planned obsolescence. “In the world of planned obsolescence, the service contract plays a most vital role,” wrote journalist Art Buchwald in the Los Angeles Times in 1971.37 The concern was that intentionally faulty products would prompt consumers to buy lucrative service plans as insurance against premature failure.
At the same time, there was some suggestion in discussions about planned obsolescence that the pervasiveness of the practice had in a fundamental way changed consumer expectations about what constitutes a “reasonable” duration of use in a commodity. In a 1967 newspaper article on everyday exchanges that happened to pithily sum up the zeitgeist, a woman was described who, overhearing someone boasting that some product had been working well since 1965, responded with the comment: “Now that’s barely two years but to her its apparently endless eons . . . come on you ad writers, life may be ephemeral—planned obsolescence and all—but not that ephemeral!”38
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Time for Things