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

Packard was tapping into a broad current of concern about product quality and sales tactics, which had been building for some time, and became crystallized in fears about planned obsolescence. Even before the publication of The Waste Makers, these fears had become widespread enough that in 1959 an article appeared in the Harvard Business Review on the topic of how business should respond to them.14 The editors introduced the piece by noting that “business has been subjected to a barrage of criticism about one of its characteristic practices, planned obsolescence.”15 Evidently there was concern in the business community about the popular sentiment gathering around the issue. A representative expression of the kind of criticism that gave rise to this concern is given by Irwin Frost, writing as the “Voice of Youth” in the Chicago Tribune: “One of the greatest evils in industrial society is that of planned obsolescence.” Irwin announces, “This . . . maneuver of most manufacturers to squeeze the sponge of the customer’s pocketbook dry is the least excusable. Products are quietly but definitely fabricated to wear out, break or become useless in a relatively short span of time.”16 In an attempt, in 1958, to give a more balanced assessment of planned obsolescence, Charles Neal, economic pundit for the Los Angeles Times, weighed the pros and cons of the practice. Echoing London’s argument, Neal saw an upside to the practice in its stimulating efect on production. For Neal the considerably weightier downside, however, was its negative impact on families with limited budgets, and the risk of “overproduction.”17 Fear of planned obsolescence was cited as one of the motivations households had for consulting the publications of testing organization such as Consumers Union.18

The broad impact of concerns about planned obsolescence is indicated by the thematization of the topic across a number of diferent cultural forms. In 1962 a radio program was devoted to the issue, under the title “Consumer

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Fig. 9.1: Grin & Bear It, © 1962 North America Syndicate Inc.

Problems: Planned Obsolescence.”19 By the early 1960s, the idea of planned obsolescence had become prominent enough to be a subject for a number of newspaper cartoons, such as the one in Figure 9.1, from the Washington Post.

In 1968, a play was staged in Los Angeles, taking comic aim at “horsepower addicts,” while in the process dealing with issues of intergenerational diference. The play explored the idea that planned obsolescence separates the young from their elders. In it a youth informs us that “planned obsolescence has penetrated into the heart of the people. For us of this generation, nothing lasts, not even love.” One reviewer, writing in the Los Angeles Times, wryly opined that; “the play is one that would be unlikely to enjoy a long run in Detroit but Angelenos will find it an interesting trip.”20 A Chicago Tribune piece pleading for the preservation of an old Chicago federal building makes a similar association between planned obsolescence and the aesthetics and values of the younger generation, explaining the urge to trash the old building as a product of: “the cult of newness, youth, and planned obsolescence.”21

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GRIN AND BEAR IT

In the 1970s, the concept still had enough cultural currency to be thematized in a popular board game, Beat Detroit, put out by Dynamic Games. In the game players move cars around a board while avoiding hidden traps set by the auto industry. The goal is for players to get suficient use value out of their vehicles to justify their purchase price, thereby “beating” the auto industry. The game concept was introduced as being “based on an elemental fact of American life: most automobiles disintegrate before they can be paid for (in economic language that’s known as planned obsolescence).”22 This description was evoking concerns about a practice thought to be widespread in the auto industry. A poll of consumers conducted by the Louis Harris organization in 1972 for Life magazine found that a large majority thought that the auto industry was interested in “planned obsolescence rather than long term use,” with 75 percent registering “a negative rating on the industry’s ability to give a good value for money.”23

The suspicion that planned obsolescence was at play in industrial design extended well beyond the confines of Detroit and the automobile industry. “Nowhere is the curse of American planned obsolescence more infuriating than in the toy department,” we are informed in a review of a guide to shopping by mail.24 The opinion put forth in an article about hi-fi is quite typical in its assessment of the pervasiveness of planned obsolescence: “Planned obsolescence and shoddy workmanship seem to be a fact of life one must learn to live with when buying and using most consumer goods.”25 The accusation of planning obsolescence was even leveled (albeit with a certain amount of levity) at luminaries of the economics profession. In a review of the latest edition of Paul Samuelson’s hugely successful textbook, Economics, Robert F. Mathieson slyly noted that “by keeping his discussion of problems contemporary he can come out with a new text every three years. Planned obsolescence at its best.”26 The term became extended to refer to the social, political, and even biological domains. One natural extension of the concept of planned obsolescence was to describe what happens to workers made unemployed by technological change. Such change efected “the planned obsolescence of a .  .  . career.”27 In this case, the term was used to evoke a pervasive anxiety about the rate of change in the modern economy and the ability of its workforce to keep up. The term was also used to describe the plight of other categories of person one way or another threatened with being made redundant by change. In 1960, the Los Angeles Times ran a series on the “housewife dilemma,” about the fate of stay-at-home mothers after their children begin school, which begins by posing the question: “Must today’s home-maker be a victim of planned obsolescence?”28 Planned obsolescence was also used to rhetorical efect to characterize attitudes toward the elderly as well as to describe the biological process of aging. An article entitled “Can We Control Aging” begins by noting that “the aging process has been likened to planned obsolescence—in that every cell in the body is programmed to die.”29 The term cropped up everywhere.

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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

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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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1. The Response of Business to Accusations of Planned Obsolescence

The intensity of the concerns about planned obsolescence meant that companies, as well as individuals working in business and marketing, felt some pressure to address the issue. The response of business to planned obsolescence varied from sympathy, to puzzlement, to defensiveness, to leveraging the issue through marketing campaigns in order to increase sales. How business responded to the concerns about planned obsolescence sheds some oblique light on the nature of public worries about the matter.

A significant number of people in business felt that the criticisms of planned obsolescence were justified. This is indicated by a survey of 10,000 “business executives” about the matter conducted by the Harvard Business Review in 1959. Of the 3,100 respondents, two-thirds agreed that “too large a part of our present economy is based on superficial product obsolescence.”39 Nonetheless, the gravity of the accusation that industry practiced planned obsolescence prompted many businesses to formulate some kind of defensive response. A number of diferent strategies were followed. One common strategy on the part of business to the controversy was to argue that, without planned obsolescence, there would be a shortfall in efective demand, which would damage the economy and therefore ultimately harm consumers by putting their jobs in jeopardy. Top GM executives, interviewed in a 1960 New York Times article, admitted that annual model changes were “one of the most highly controversial aspects of the automobile industry” but gave the practice a positive spin by describing it as a manifestation of the “challenge of change.” They argued that model changes were ultimately justifiable because of the supposed benefits of the practice for customers, workers, manufacturers, and the economy.40 In a somewhat similar vein, rapid model changes were portrayed by some business figures as necessary to achieve the economies of scale that ultimately made consumer durables afordable. John F. Gordon, GM president and chief operating oficer, defended his company’s practice of annual model change by arguing that “little or no annual change [in style] would cut sales, and hence make each car more expensive,” claiming that “the extra cost would be suficient to ofset any saving resulting from not changing models” (a view echoed by Herman F. Lehman, GM’s vice-president in charge of the Frigidaire division).41 If car owners did not “upgrade” their vehicles to new models every year, Gordon argued, they “would continue to use the same car as long as it gave satisfactory service. There would be no incentive to replace it. Obviously, this would cut our annual sales in half. . . . With volume reduced, each car would cost more to produce, and I am sure that this increased cost would more than ofset any saving resulting from not changing models.”42 The reasoning here is quite strange. On one level it sets out quite clearly the high-volume logic of Fordist industrial production while making an association between what works best for the manufacturer with large capital investments (stable and high demand) and the interests of the consumer. Yet it is entirely unclear what the benefit to the consumer is supposed to be, for the argument is quite circular. The argument is that frequent model changes are required in order to make cars cheap enough for them to be replaced more frequently than is, from a strictly functional point of view (the view according to which the function of a car is to transport people safely and comfortably from point A to point B), necessary. So rather than having one entirely serviceable car over a six-year period, the consumer comes to own several cars over that period. What is also striking about GM’s defense of its practice of frequent model changes is the conspicuous absence of the argument that value is a subjective matter—so if consumers want new cars, even though those that they own are still perfectly functional, that must be because there is genuine added value in newness. Rather, GM defended the practice of style obsolescence in terms of its role in stimulating real innovation, its importance in stabilizing the economy, and controlling price. GM’s executives were then justifying a rapid product cycle in terms of its positive efect on social welfare. The social benefit argument was extended to include the role of planned obsolescence in facilitating a healthy secondhand market, which made durables available to socioeconomic groups that would not otherwise be able to aford them.

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Perhaps this focus on the macroeconomic and social consequences of business practices was a hangover from the concerns of the Depression years.

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Yet by the 1950s, thinking about consumption had to a significant extent moved beyond the collectivist mindset of the 1930s, instead becoming focused on a quasi-contractual relationship between producers and individual consumers. Even the “business executives” surveyed by the Harvard Business Review in 1959—many of whom surely had some vested interest in rationalizing planned obsolescence—were roughly equally divided for and against the view that planned obsolescence is a necessary evil to protect the economy.43

A second line of response to the controversy on the part of industry was simply to deny that the practice of planned obsolescence existed. For example, Harold W. Johnson, head of the vehicles and components research at Ford’s Research and Engineering Center in Dearborn, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times about the auto industry, made a point of attacking the suggestion that nefarious forms of planned obsolescence were implemented by the industry: “Styling cycles are characteristic of American marketing in many, many products. Last year’s car is no more obsolete than last year’s coat or refrigerator. As for ‘planned obsolescence’, this is pure nonsense.”44 Likewise, when, in 1973, Gillette introduced a range of new disposable products and critics suggested that the new items represented “a sort of planned obsolescence,” the company issued heated denials.45

A third line of response from a business perspective to public fears about planned obsolescence was to argue that consumers could not so easily be duped, asserting the primacy of consumer sovereignty in determining the shape of the marketplace. The financial weekly Barron’s published a piece in 1961 defending business from accusations about planned obsolescence made by Packard and J. K. Galbraith: “Bureaucrats and best-selling authors to the contrary notwithstanding, the buying public, far from being the victim of ruthless manipulation, is actually the one that pulls the strings. Or, to hark back to an old saying which has lost none of its point, in the US the consumer is king. While his reign has been challenged time and again, often with a temporary measure of success, in the end he has tended to prevail. Let those who would challenge him now think twice.”46 Another financial weekly, Fortune magazine, in a 1963 editorial went so far as to blame the mini-recession of 1958, the sharpest economic downturn experienced in the United States during the boom years between 1945 and 1970, on “moralists” who objected to planned obsolescence: “Recall for a moment the auto industry’s dark days in 1958. General Motor’s net earnings were of 24.9 percent in that year; Ford was of 60.5 percent; Chrysler was sufering the worst season ever. Dealers had huge inventories and were closing up all over the country. The aesthetes were in rebellion over tail fins and chrome, and the moralists were lecturing against the ‘planned obsolescence’ of new models.”47 The opinion that there was a connection between the concern about planned obsolescence and the 1958 recession was not, however, shared by everyone in business. For example, Judson S. Sayre, head of Norge, the appliance-making division of the Borg Warner corporation, put the blame for the recession squarely on the practice of planned obsolescence itself, the efect of which was to cause “consumer confusion and self-induced business recession.”48 Perhaps in an efort to reduce “consumer confusion” about planned obsolescence, Maytag, another maker of appliances, made a decision in the late 1960s to provide the consumer with more information about the expected life span of its products. The objective was to counter “suggestions that manufacturers practice planned obsolescence by giving the consumer better notions of the life expectancy of his machines.”49

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The suggestion that there was a pervasive conspiracy to limit product durability stung industry and marketing enough to prompt public relations campaigns to debunk the notion. In 1964, Burson-Marsteller Inc., Chicago-based marketing and public relations firm, took out a series of full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal defending the activities of marketing firms against Packard’s accusations.50 The ad begins: “Some of our best friends are wastemakers. They waste the ordinary for the unique. They waste the possible for the impossible, the good for the better, the old for the new.” The argument, often wheeled out in the back and forth over planned obsolescence, was that obsolescence is a result of progress. “Product innovation makes waste, say the critics of American marketing,” the ad went on, “They say that innovation will shorten the life-span of a product, create dissatisfaction, and proliferate products. They are right, of course. But is it immoral to innovate?”51 Herman F. Lehman, head of Frigidaire, likewise promoted the idea of planned obsolescence as the handmaiden of technical progress. He contrasted the technical dynamism encouraged by frequent product changes with the stasis implicit in the design philosophy championed by Ransom E. Olds, father of the Oldsmobile. Lehman noted disparagingly, and with the implication of naivety, that, in 1912, Olds had referred to his vehicle as “my farewell car” because, “I do not believe that a car materially better will ever be built” (Olds was expressing an attitude similar to Henry Ford’s to the model T).52

In order to put a positive spin on the marketing and industrial strategies associated with planned obsolescence, the automobile industry adopted alternative names for the practice, using terms that imply that obsolescence is an inevitable byproduct of the march of progress. Planned obsolescence was referred to as “dynamic obsolescence,” “progressive obsolescence,” and “planned progress.” John F. Gordon, GM head, in a 1960 statement on the issue put it as follows: “It is clear to me that new car buyers have benefited tremendously over the years from what has been termed planned obsolescence but which we think is more accurately called dynamic obsolescence.”53 James R. Roche, who succeeded Gordon as president of GM, echoed this defense of the auto industry against accusations of “wasteful planned obsolescence,” describing yearly style changes as “planned improvements” and “planned creativity,” which, he argued, “stimulates sales by ofering improved quality, safety and performance” each year.54 Robert F. Hurleigh, president of Mutual Broadcasting System Incorporated, averred that widespread planned obsolescence was a figment of the public’s imagination, that the practice “is the exception, not the rule of industry” and that what was really being spoken about in most discussions about “planned obsolescence” was just progress, plain and simple. Writing in the MBS newsletter, Of Mutual Interest, Hurleigh contended that: “The great majority of American manufacturers do not ‘plan’ obsolescence. They plan progress,” and that, “in the process of knocking ‘planned obsolescence,’ some authors have made enough money to ‘obsolete’ many of their own previous conceptions of how they would like to live.”55 Perhaps in response to the eagerness of industry to associate obsolescence with progress, the argument was made, in the late 1960s, that modern science itself—the supposed engine of progress—had been corrupted and co-opted by the industrial logic of planned obsolescence. The suggestion was that it was not that planned obsolescence served the forces of “progress” but rather the converse—that the forces of progress had come to serve planned obsolescence.56

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Despite the eforts of business to defuse the issue, by the early 1960s planned obsolescence had become a matter of widespread concern, to the point that many prominent business and marketing figures, and some professional bodies, felt the need to publicly distance themselves from the practice. In 1962, the American Marketing Association became suficiently concerned about the suggestion that its members were participants in a conspiracy to push planned obsolescence on the consuming public that it issued a broad call to arms to the profession, insisting that the matter needed to be forthrightly addressed. The argument the organization made was that what was needed in response to accusations about the marketing of planned obsolescence was a public relations campaign on behalf of marketing itself. D. Beryl Manischewitz and John A. Stuart, two prominent marketing executives, likewise drew attention, in an article published in the July issue of the Journal of Marketing, to the need for the advertising industry to take a more active stance in defending itself. They suggested that one way to accomplish this would be for marketers to preempt criticism by launching a systematic investigation into supposed practices of “planned obsolescence” and “administered prices” (Maniscewitz and Stuart 1960). The supposition was that the results of such an investigation would clear the industry of wrongdoing.57 The authors accepted the moral logic on the basis of which planned obsolescence was regarded as an objectionable practice—the issue was not whether planned obsolescence is a bad thing or not, but rather whether or not the practice, as imagined by Packard and other critics, actually existed.

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