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# Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

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In discursive practice there is much semantic slippage between the diferent forms of obsolescence, and it is often unclear exactly what form is at issue in a given discussion. There are also liminal cases that fall between the different kinds of obsolescence. For example, cases in which a product retains its functionality yet comes to be thought of as obsolescent because newer versions appear that are technically superior fall between style and technical obsolescence. While the “obsolete” product is still entirely functional, at the same time because it is technically inferior to newer versions, it becomes regarded as obsolete by comparison.

2. What Is Puzzling about the Concern over Planned Obsolescence?

Before pressing forward with a finer-grained analysis of the mid-century controversy around planned obsolescence, some consideration ought to be given to a possible objection to the notion that there is much of interest in the topic. Surely, the objection goes, the concern about planned obsolescence simply reflects an entirely understandable preoccupation on the part of consumers with getting value for money, in combination with a sensibly suspicious stance toward big business and its underlying motives. If this commonsense intuition is correct, what then is so puzzling about the mid-century worries about planned obsolescence?

There are at least two reasons for thinking that the preoccupation with planned obsolescence was not just a straightforward matter of rational consumers practicing due diligence by interrogating the design of industrial products. First, the degree of concern over planned material obsolescence is surprisingly high, given that the evidence for widespread implementation of the practice was slim to nonexistent. As we shall see later in the chapter, in the early 1970s the Federal Trade Commission investigated material obsolescence and found no evidence that the practice was at all common. Moreover, it is unclear what criterion should be used to determine whether egregious material obsolescence is present in a given product. If material obsolescence means that an object breaks before its time, what then determines its time? What is it that establishes a reasonable duration of use for a consumer durable? In the discussions about planned material obsolescence (so-called death dates), the answer to that question remains obscure.

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Furthermore, according to basic economic theory, under competitive market conditions costs of production and price tend to converge, so if cheaper, less durable materials get used in a product, this should result in cheaper prices. That implies that under broadly competitive conditions consumers on the whole get what they pay for and so have no obvious cause for feeling cheated when their products fail. It seems plausible that material obsolescence in its most heinous imagined form, scrimping on materials and workmanship while keeping prices high, is, therefore, only possible under monopoly conditions (Bulow 1986). Yet for economic and legal reasons— competitive pressures in the capitalist economy on the one hand and antitrust laws on the other—monopolies (and oligopolies) are not easy to establish or maintain. So it would seem that the most objectionable form of material obsolescence—low quality at high prices—was quite unlikely to have been a widespread feature of the mid-century economy.

Of course, even in the absence of monopoly conditions, with price and product characteristics set by the market, it could still be the case that consumers would prefer their products to be significantly more durable than is typically the case. Yet that would be puzzling given the rate at which—for reasons connected to style and technical obsolescence—consumers replace commodities. What sense would it make to add to costs, and therefore price, by designing products to be more durable than the likely duration of ownership? If, for example, consumers on average replace their cars every three years (as was the case in the 1960s), why should they object if manufacturers design them not to last for much longer than that, as long as that gets reflected in the price? Surely material durability should be determined by the predicted average length and intensity of product use? Indeed, an alternative way of understanding planned material obsolescence is as the application of “value engineering,” According to the principle of value engineering, which was pioneered by General Electric during the Second World War with the aim of maximizing the eficiency of wartime production, probable patterns of product use should be taken into account in designing product durability. The idea is to engineer a level of durability in products that fits the expected average duration and intensity of their use, with some added margin for safety. Within this paradigm, products not designed with their likely use in mind risk being ineficient by virtue of being “overengineered”—a condition in which a product’s material durability is higher than it needs to be. The product then tends to outlast its actual useful life. Insofar as a gratuitous surplus of durability increases cost with no added benefit in use, this counts as waste.2 From the perspective of value engineering, therefore, to reject planned material obsolescence risks the wasteful use of productive resources in overengineered products.3

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Style obsolescence, of the sort most commonly identified with yearly model changes in the automobile industry, is a more obviously real phenomenon than material obsolescence. It is not clear, however, in what sense any reneging on contractual or moral obligations on the part of business is involved in this form of obsolescence. If consumers choose to trade in last year’s model of some commodity for the latest version, in what sense are producers to blame? And yet a good deal of criticism was directed at the practice of frequent model changes. Even as sober a body as the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in a study analyzing depreciation in the auto market, came to the conclusion that style obsolescence has deleterious economic efects.4 The view expressed in the study was that the depreciation caused by planned obsolescence of style (as opposed to substantive changes in function) is in some sense a “false” depreciation, resulting in unnecessary waste. The study, which was cited by Vance Packard (1960, p.  88), estimated that frequent model changes were causing automobiles to depreciate “twice as fast as they reasonably should.” A normative distinction was being made here between genuine material reasons for depreciation and style-related reasons that are somehow illegitimate. But within what moral framework is style, or “psychological,” obsolescence objectionable, and loss of value for aesthetic reasons an “unreasonable” kind of depreciation? Again, the answer is not obvious.5

Technical obsolescence might have been a more genuine concern. If products are rendered useless because they have become incompatible with an infrastructure required for their use that is continuously being upgraded, then consumers might have good reason to feel hard done by. Yet prior to the explosive development in the later twentieth century of consumer products incorporating information technology, with software standards linked to rapidly evolving hardware, obsolescence of this kind was not very common. In the mid-century discourse about planned obsolescence, concerns about technical obsolescence are, in any case, not strongly expressed. The moral panic about the issue focused primarily on material and style obsolescence.

Concerns about obsolescence thus seem underdetermined by the economic facts of the matter, given the unlikeliness of widespread material obsolescence, the obscurity of the reasons for regarding style obsolescence as problematic, and the fact that technical obsolescence was not a common fact of product life until later on in the twentieth century (by which time the intense concern about planned obsolescence had largely subsided). How then can we account for the force of mid-century fears and suspicions about planned obsolescence?

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In the remainder of this chapter, I try to answer this question by analyzing talk about planned obsolescence in the middle part of the last century. My objective is to tease out the issues at stake in the discussion and its underlying assumptions. With this aim in mind, I chart the changing terms of the controversy around planned obsolescence, as it unfolded in the public sphere from the first appearance of the concept in the 1930s, through to its articulation to nascent concerns about the environment in the early 1970s. The focus of the chapter is on how the controversy illuminates normative notions about use and exchange in the context of the Fordist moral economy that emerged by the middle decades of the twentieth century.

3. Tracking Moral Panics and Disturbances

It is perhaps a sociological truism that not every element of a culture that has normative force is spelled out explicitly as a norm. Even where norms are made somewhat explicit, for example in law, it is often the case that the account given of the norm is rather thin—the norm is articulated as a rule without elaboration of the underlying system of values within which the rule makes sense. Moreover, the relative importance of a norm, and its influence on behavior, cannot be inferred just from formal statements of the norm. Some rules can be broken with relative impunity. Others, when transgressed, induce extremely powerful reactions. For these reasons, in order to give a full account of a norm, it is often necessary to elicit a “thick” account of it, by way of various forms of ethnographic investigation. What can we do, however, when we are interested in the normative dimension of a past that is accessible only as refracted through the materials of archives—when, therefore, it is impossible to develop a deeper understanding of the norms underlying actions and reactions by questioning, or just directly observing, living subjects? To get a fuller picture of past norms we must go beyond just attending to formal statements about norms, such as those found in law, and develop more oblique interpretive approaches. One strategy is to analyze the shape and intensity of the response where norms are thought to have been transgressed. The historical analyst pays particular attention to the way in which things get talked out in expressions of outrage, then makes abductions about the moral background within which that talk makes sense.

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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.

4. 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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The peak decade for articles discussing planned obsolescence was the 1960s, after which the term drops away somewhat, until the 1990s, which show an increase over the preceding decade.6 This pattern reflects the heightened concern about planned obsolescence in the late 1950s and 1960s, the ebbing of the issue in the later 1970s and 1980s, and then, toward the end of the century, the increasing importance of a new context of application for the concept, with the rapid growth of the information technology industry.

Insofar as the term planned obsolescence has a presence in the 1930s (and it does not to any significant degree), it is in relation to debates and discussions about the role of underconsumption in producing, or prolonging, the Depression. The term first appears in print in the work of businessman Bernard London, whose pamphlet How to End the Depression by Means of Planned Obsolescence was published in 1932. The nature and scope of London’s argument is quite explicit in its title. London advocated using planned obsolescence to increase consumer demand by reducing the length of ownership of things. The benefit of this would be that it would provide muchneeded stimulus for the depressed economy. This use of planned obsolescence was similar to an earlier term, progressive obsolescence, which was used by the American home economist Christine Frederick in her influential 1929 book, Selling Mrs. Consumer.7 Like Charles Babbage a century earlier, Frederick (1929, p.  81) saw progressive obsolescence as a natural and necessary byproduct of the onward march of technology and industrial society: “The machine and power era makes it not only possible but vital to apply in the home the doctrine of creative waste.” Frederick defined progressive obsolescence as :“1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open;

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eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living. 2) A readiness to ‘scrap or lay aside an article before its natural life is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing. 3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one’s income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living” (p. 246). Although Frederick wrote her book before the Depression had taken hold, she, like London, argued that, for the sake of economic stability, consumption should be regimented according to the requirements of the Taylorist system of mass production.8

In the postwar period, however the term planned obsolescence takes on a very marked negative moral charge. Perhaps significantly, Vance Packard makes no mention at all of London’s positive account of planned obsolescence in his influential 1960 book on the topic. Packard’s primary target was rather the industrial designer Brook Stevens, who, in the early 1950s, advocated planned obsolescence as vital for the health of business and the economy at large.

In the middle years of the century, planned obsolescence was typically regarded as problematic because the practice supposedly short-changed the consumer. Businesses were seen as reneging on their obligations to the consumer by cutting short the duration of potential useful activity facilitated by commodities they sold to the public, either by engineered “death dates” or by inducing psychological dissatisfaction. From the early 1970s onward, however, concerns about planned obsolescence took an environmental turn. The practice was condemned on the grounds that it produces pollution and waste, with adverse efects on the environment. At the same time, in the last quarter of the century the perceived locus of the problem to some extent shifted from nefarious business practice to misguided or unthinking consumers.

Planned obsolescence has continued to have a significant presence in public discourse up until the present day. However, the negative moral aura carried by the term dissipated to a significant extent toward the end of the twentieth century. The term became more neutral and descriptive, used in particular in reference to increasing technical obsolescence associated with information technology, which tends to be narrated as a quasi-natural process. By the century’s end planned obsolescence came to be viewed much as Babbage and Frederick saw it, as a normal corollary of technical progress.

I would suggest that the waxing and waning of concerns about planned obsolescence reflects tectonic changes in capitalism. The evolving discourse about planned obsolescence, as mentioned earlier, tracks the decline of capitalism’s Golden Age corporatist form, in which a stable arrangement between labor and business ensured that increases in labor productivity would be reflected in increasing real wages (Glyn 2006). Arguably the environmental critique was able to take center stage discussions about product obsolescence in part because the moral framework undergirding Golden Age corporatism had receded somewhat. In that framework, labor, productivity, wages, and consumption had been brought together in a moral economy hinged on the fair exchange of equivalents. I will return to this line of interpretation in the discussion at the end of the chapter.

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5. 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.

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6. 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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The term planned obsolescence has some presence elsewhere in the academic and para-academic literature of the earlier 1950s. Marshall McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, characterized the nihilism of consumer society as “born of the social conditions of rapid turnover, planned obsolescence, and systematic change for its own sake” (McLuhan 1951, p. 13). Challenge, a periodical covering economic afairs, published a piece by economist Lawrence  A. Abbott (1957) about “a new trick-of-the-trade: ‘planned obsolescence.’” In it, he explored the thought that “planned obsolescence can be real or psychologically induced,” with the former being a result of substantive progress, while the latter implying merely superficial changes in product form. Abbott’s summary of the dilemma consumers face when confronted by the specter of planned obsolescence is typical of mid-century concerns expressed about the practice: “Here is a real problem for consumers. Does obsolescence measure benefits in real goods or does it indicate the presence of waste and ineficiency? To put the matter bluntly, are we, as consumers, getting our money’s worth, or is business pulling one over on us?” (p. 33).

It was, however, through Packard’s book that the concept became a lightning rod for popular worries about the workings of the industrial economy. Packard’s prominence as a critic in mid-century America should not be underestimated. His polemics against industrial and commercial practices evidently hit a nerve with the public at large. Indeed, a lengthy 1964 Chicago Tribune portrait of the journalist went under the title “Vance Packard: Specialist in Touching Raw Nerves!”12 Between 1957 and 1960, he published three books, all of which made the New York Times best-seller list—The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), and The Waste Makers (1960). The Waste Makers stayed on the best-seller list for six weeks and quickly became the main reference point for discussions about the issues surrounding product obsolescence. Business ethicist Joseph Guiltinan (2009, p. 19), reminiscing in 2009 about the early stages of his career, writes, “when I first started teaching marketing [in the 1960s], Vance Packard’s criticisms of planned obsolescence were widely discussed by students and faculty. The prevailing view was that it was unethical to design products that would wear out ‘prematurely’ (i.e. have useful lives that were well below consumer expectations) particularly if they were costly to replace.” The ethics underlying GM’s strategy of style obsolescence, one of Packard’s targets, were also frequently questioned in the 1960s. Even business leaders in the car industry expressed qualms about the practice. For example, in response to the suggestion by a US auto executive, hired to help revive the fortunes of trouble British car manufacturer British Motor Holdings (BMC), that American practices of planned obsolescence should be introduced to the UK market, UK executives responded that such an approach would be “unfair to customers.”13

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