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

Anxiety about being implicated in planned obsolescence extended to members of various professions involved in industrial production. Henry Dreyfus, the prominent industrial designer, in 1968 contributed an op-ed piece to the Wall Street Journal defending his profession from any suggestion that it was involved in the conspiracy (the existence of which was taken as given) to compromise use value through planning obsolescence. “Although industrial designers are in the business of change,” he comments, “we resent planned obsolescence. A change in technology, improved eficiency, additional safety or comfort, a new utility development, an improved method of fabrication, the introduction of new material—these warrant a new physical expression. But to put a ‘new look’ on an existing piece of merchandise—this, to us, constitutes the duping of an unsuspecting public.”58 Likewise, David M. Pesanelli, former designer for Ford automobiles, wrote an extended exposé for the Washington Post in which he described the practice of planned obsolescence; condemned it for violating the moral obligation to produce durable items, expressive of “the value system that considers that possessions are meant to be cherished for years”; and ofered consumers practical advice on how to resist the associated marketing strategy: “Two factors limit the desirability span of any product. One is the precisely measured design life of product components. The other is faddish styling that causes that bluesy feeling when next year’s model arrives. Either of these will get to you,” he warned. The advice Pesanelli ofered consumers, on the basis of which they would, he suggested, be empowered to resist the marketing sophistry of “new design,” is to cultivate an eye for “timeless quality.” He also advised them to make use of Consumer Reports test results to assess performance and reliability.59 Similarly, in 1959 engineer and designer Jack Waldheim, penned a passionate denunciation of planned obsolescence and “death dating” in Design News: “Planned obsolescence is the deliberate attempt to have something break down or become outdated long before it has lost its usefulness—its utility—or its value.  .  .  . Its danger to the customer is that it cheats him of his hard-earned money, though he may not realize it in the beginning.”60 The moral status of planned obsolescence was also addressed by engineers attempting to square their professional practice with their religious commitments. In October 1967, a Christian vocation seminar for engineers was held in Chicago specifically to discuss “ethical issues” arising from planned obsolescence. Taking a stronger position than these designers and engineers, perhaps because his profession was perceived as being more directly involved in the practice, Walter Henry Nelson, a repentant former ad man, went on the record about the pathologies of the American economic model, which he had spent his professional life promoting: “I’ve always been dismayed by the planned obsolescence and shoddy workmanship in all too many American cars. Too many American businessmen are more interested in seeming good than in being good.”61

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1. Marketing “Planned Durability”

The strongly negative opinions about planned obsolescence prompted some companies to make an efort to signal that their products were designed and constructed according to diametrically opposite principles. This was particularly true of the auto industry. In the 1960s a large number of ad campaigns were launched by corporations, the point of which was specifically to deny that they implemented planned obsolescence. “Borgward does not believe in ‘planned obsolescence,’” went one advertisement, typical of those adopting this strategy, adding, “Improvements are made gradually—without outward changes.”62 Similarly, the copy in a Volkswagen ad from 1959 proclaims: “We do not believe in planned obsolescence. We don’t change a car for the sake of change,” continuing to note, like the Borgward advertisement, that while the company makes changes to its products every year, these changes constitute invisible improvements to function and durability rather than being merely stylistic.63 One ad agency announced that its strategy was to take clients (in this case Volvo and the American Motor Company [AMC]) along a “value” route in promoting their products, in contradistinction to “planned obsolescence.”64 AMC issued a press release in 1960 proclaiming its resolute stance against planned obsolescence. According to one report, “American Motors Corporation announced it will open another attack on ‘planned obsolescence’ in automobiles in 1960. The company said it will introduce ceramic coated muflers as standard equipment in its 1961 models in an efort to prove that cars don’t have to start falling apart after three years or 70,000 miles of driving.”65 In the 1960s, at least eight major car manufacturers— Mercedes, Volkswagen, Peugeot, AMC, Volvo, BMW, Rover, Borgward, and Rolls Royce—in addition to several smaller brands (Checkers and Imperial, for example), launched advertising campaigns organized around the message that their cars were emphatically not produced according to the principle of planned obsolescence. A 1963 campaign launched for Checker Family Cars (an ofshoot of Checker’s taxi cabs) was built around the message “No Planned Obsolescence, Planned Permanence!”66 Similarly, Imperial, Chrysler’s luxury brand, went to great lengths in its 1961 advertising campaign to distinguish itself on the basis of being resistant to obsolescence. The lead copy of the ad was “Planned continuity is part of its elegance.” It went on to note that “Imperial’s design reflects planned continuity, not planned obsolescence. This magnificent automobile—except for many refinements—has remained unchanged for the past five model years. . . . Thus, Imperial’s owners pay little penalty in money or satisfaction when the next Imperial model comes out.” The ad makes an association between the absence of model changes and physical durability, describing the Imperial as “America’s most carefully built car.”67

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Peugeot, another of the auto makers that pitched its cars as being made according to principles opposite to planned obsolescence—as “planned without obsolescence”—used the slogan “more car than you’ll ever need” in one of its marketing campaigns. This prompts the question (most powerfully posed from the puzzled perspective of the value engineer) of why the consumer would ever want more car than she needs, especially given the likelihood of her having to pay for the excess. Another ad for the company claims that “it’s common for a Peugeot to get 150,000 or even 200,000 miles.”68 Volvo struck a more ironic tone in its campaign, with a 1967 ad beginning: “The paper car. The next logical step of planned obsolescence.” The ad contrasts that approach to car making with the one followed by Volvo, described as aiming to build cars that last longer “than a good suit,” with an “average life” of eleven years.

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Couched in a more straightforward and forthright rhetoric, a 1964 advertisement for Rover leads with the declaration: “No planned obsolescence, No calculated failure of material.” In a 1967 ad campaign, Rover turned the logic of annual model changes on its head, pushing as a selling point for its cars their unchanging, even backward-looking, design: “Rover is proud to turn back the clock on another model year. The Rover 2000 Sports Sedans for 1968 are dead ringers for those we unveiled last year,” one ad declares, adding, with pride, that “the Rover 2000 may become the longest running model car in history.” The Rover campaign narrated the onward march of product change not as inexorable progress but rather as a decline and fall away from timeless “classic” design. In sticking with its “classic” models, and stubbornly resisting pressure for change, Rover presented itself as engaged in a heroic struggle to resist modern obsolescence.

The marketing strategy of promoting products by emphasizing that they are not produced according to principles of planned obsolescence was followed in industries beyond car making. Whirlpool, for example, a maker of appliances, in the late 1960s launched a television ad campaign that invoked the specter of a marketplace pervaded by planned product obsolescence representing its products as, by contrast, durable and dependable, ofering consumers a safe haven from the creeping shoddiness of the age. A newspaper ad for KLH stereo equipment from 1967 begins by noting the ubiquity of “perishability” and “planned obsolescence,” interpreted as “planned dissatisfaction,” and then pitches its equipment as both durable and endowed with the aesthetic characteristics of a “classic” product—like a typewriter that “feels like a real typewriter.”69 Revco, maker of refrigerators, in a campaign from the early 1960s, made a point of emphasizing that its products are “not subjected to superficial changes resulting from ‘planned obsolescence’ as illustrated by conventional refrigeration.”70 Amana, a freezer manufacturer, poses a disturbing question to the reader of its ads: “Will it fall apart before the payments are made?” The ad notes that “with mass production has come the evil of inferior merchandise—of ‘planned obsolescence,’” an evil steadfastly resisted by the “craftsmen” at Amana.71 And in a 1971 advertisement for tiling, we are informed that “in this era of ‘planned obsolescence’, and ‘plastic imitations,’ ceramic tile is still a trademark of quality and honesty.”72 Even swimming pool installers felt the need to reassure their customers that their equipment was free of planned obsolescence: “Sunset’s progressive research and development program goes on continuously, to bring you the finest equipment possible. There is no ‘planned obsolescence.’”73 Like the auto makers, the advertising angle taken by these companies was not to make the clear and positive arguments about durability and value that Ford made in the 1920s but rather to mark their products by negation, as not made according to the principle of planned obsolescence.

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Marketing campaigns and advertising content, it should be said, are by no means necessarily directly indicative of normative concerns characteristic of a particular kind of moral economy. But the prevalence in advertising copy, particularly in the auto industry, of the message that products were not produced according to the principle of planned obsolescence indicates how pervasive the concerns were about the practice.

1. Political Response to the Issue

By the mid-1960s, the concern over planned obsolescence had become sufficiently widespread and intense that it began to come to the attention of politicians and regulatory agencies. Representative Benjamin S. Rosenthal addressing a meeting in August 1969 on the topic of the rapid expansion of discount retailers commented that “today’s typical consumer is tempted by the marketplace promises of product perfection. But the system that produces, promotes, sells, and services that product can more accurately be characterized by the reality of planned obsolescence and poor quality control.”74 A policy response to the “problem” of planned obsolescence was suggested in 1965 by Esther Peterson, special assistant to the president for consumer afairs. She argued that consumer education was the solution and ought to be incorporated into the high school curriculum. The overarching aim, as she put it, would be to produce a “consumer-led” economy, as opposed to a “consumption-led” economy. In the former, savvy and independent consumers are the chief actors, while in the latter, big business is in charge. Education was seen as a means to produce rational, sovereign consumers, who would secure the development of a virtuous and eficient consumer economy. Consumer sovereignty, on this account, is an ethical end to be accomplished, rather than, as some economists would have it, a given. Drawing attention to planned obsolescence as a central characteristic of the consumer economy, Peterson commented: “In a consumption oriented economy, anything would be permissible . . . planned obsolescence would be the rule rather than the exception to the rule.”75 Her sentiment did not meet with universal approval. The Wall Street Journal wryly commented in response that the “whole notion of indoctrinating the young in commercial conformity makes you wonder if the experts want a consumer directed economy or a flock of expert directed consumers.”76

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In a diferent vein, politicians made a connection, following Ralph Nader’s groundbreaking work on automobile safety, between planned obsolescence and car accidents. Daniel Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, commented in 1966 that planned obsolescence might cause accidents, noting a correlation between accident rates and rates of profit of auto manufacturers, and speculated that planned obsolescence “itself may account for a fair number of vehicle failures”77 (an association jokily rifed upon in a Chicago Tribune article, in 1966, about obsolescence in men’s fashion, with the title “Unsafe in Any Tweed”78).

In the early 1970s, the issue of planned obsolescence came under the scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—this despite the fact that there was by that time a growing consensus that the practice of annual model change was on the decline, at least in the auto industry.79 The FTC began its investigations with an uncommitted position on the scale of the problem. Lawrence G. Meyer, the FTC’s director of policy planning and evaluation issued a statement that he and his staf were trying to determine whether “we are dealing with a problem of mass proportions” while noting that the problem was “substantial from the consumer’s viewpoint.” At the same time, the General Counsel of the FTC, Joseph Martin, claimed that “cases of built-in obsolescence are common” and that “this planned obsolescence is accomplished by several ways—by failing to provide a source of spare parts for the reasonable life of the product, by making frequent style or nonfunctional changes so that the user feels he must turn in his old model for one which gives him better performance, and by including certain components made of materials which have a shorter life than the reasonable life expectancy of the product itself.”

The FTC’s investigation was a response to popular sentiment about the issue but also, more specifically, was in reaction to a well-publicized study on planned obsolescence, published in the Yale Law Journal by Bradford C.

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Snell (1971). In his article Snell argued that annual model change in the auto industry constitutes an unfair trade practice, on the grounds that the yearly costs of retooling work as a barrier to market entry.80 On Snell’s estimate, in 1969 alone the “Big Three” auto manufacturers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) spent \$1.5 billion to change their tooling in order to produce new models. At the same time, Snell noted, the Bureau of Labor Statistics “reported a new reduction in performance improvements of \$3 per 1969 automobile.” The conclusion Snell drew from these figures was that the big three spent more than a billion and a half dollars to make their 1969 models seem “new and diferent” in appearance. In the process, they erected nigh impenetrable barriers to market entry: “In 1970, it would cost a company \$779 million to enter the automobile industry. The costs of annual style change capability, it is estimated, account for fully \$724 million, or more than 90 percent of this figure” (Snell 1971, p.  588). Snell further argued that the efect of planned obsolescence was to stifle “real” product improvements, by substituting superficial changes in design for genuine innovation. Snell’s analysis is worth quoting at length, both because it proved quite influential and because Snell makes a connection not usually explicitly made between style and material obsolescence:

It has been noted that the innovative characteristics of the industry began to decline shortly after annual restyling was introduced in the 1920s . . . by introducing a ‘new’ model each year, they provide the illusion of progress, and yet avoid the necessity of adopting technological improvements which would lower maintenance or initial purchase cost. It has been argued, for instance, that application of known metallurgical processes would permit doubling the life of an automobile for an additional cost of \$36 per year. . . . These developments, however, would increase automobile durability and thereby reduce demand, price and profits on new car sales. It is suspected therefore, that the Big Three have repressed these cost-savings while ofering consumers instead an annual restyling policy designed to bolster replacement demand through planned obsolescence. (Snell 1971, p. 59)

On Snell’s reasoning, then, durability was sacrificed on the altar of style— not style as an independent source of utility, but rather style as a false sign of material progress, a substitute for the real thing. In this way, so the argument went, consumers are duped into buying new models, perhaps on the mistaken assumption that stylistic flourishes such as tail fins index substantive, functional improvements—and therein lies a deception. Ralph Nader joined Snell and the editors of the Yale Law Journal in petitioning the FTC to launch an investigation into planned obsolescence, and the FTC agreed to look into the matter. Significantly, the FTC, in responding to Snell and Nader’s petition, made a distinction between material and style obsolescence. While evidence of material obsolescence was held to be actionable, style obsolescence was deemed to be an issue of taste and, therefore, not a proper matter for regulative intervention. Ultimately, however, nothing came of the FTC’s investigation, because no evidence of intentional material obsolescence could be found.

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The basis on which material obsolescence was considered by the FTC to be an illegitimate practice was that, in addition to possibly running afoul of federal antitrust laws, it short-changed the consumer. Planned obsolescence violated what were held to be reasonable, yet only vaguely defined, expectations about the durability and repairability of products. “The consumer is entitled,” FTC director Meyers maintained, “to expect that replacement parts—particularly minor parts—will be available for the reasonably predicted useful life of the item in question. . . . Similarly, in my view, the commission is also concerned about durability obsolescence—the intentional inclusion by some manufacturers of an inferior part within a product where the usage of a better part would not add significantly to the cost of the final product.”81 The FTC’s statement implies that a producer has a moral and legal obligation to make objects as durable as possible at a given price point—and that failure to do so, even under nonmonopoly conditions, warrants state regulation and possible sanctions.82

The response to the FTC investigation varied in quite predictable ways. Guenther Baumgart, president of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, complained that the FTC was searching for something that did not exist: “We have no evidence of the deliberate planning of products to wear out prematurely.” By contrast, Morris Kaplan, director of the Consumers Union, commented that “it is definitely possible to design products that will last a great deal longer than they do.”83 But all sides shared the assumption that there is some objectively “reasonable” (therefore fair) duration of use consumers should get out of the products they purchase.

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1. Planned Obsolescence as Matter of Environmental Concern

By the early 1970s, the issue of planned obsolescence was beginning to be folded into growing concern about the environment. In 1970, the first Earth Day was organized by a coalition of some five thousand environmental groups. In publicity for the event, planned obsolescence featured prominently, listed alongside the other main causes of imminent environmental catastrophe, such as overpopulation, war, poverty, and pollution.84 In the same year, design guru Viktor Papanek, in an interview in the Chicago Tribune, accused the big four auto makers of wasteful and environmentally irresponsible practices. He spoke in strong and provocative terms: “First they build the most perfect killing machine yet devised by man. As it runs, it pollutes the visual environment. Its ofal pollutes the air. And when it expires at an early date, the result of planned obsolescence, its remains clutter up the landscape and waste space.”85

This concern about the environmental consequences of planned obsolescence was relatively novel. Prior to the 1970s, environmental matters were not a significant presence in the discussions about the issue. In the 1940s, Alfred P. Sloan had ofhandedly dismissed worries that planned obsolescence would lead to automobile graveyards “defiling the landscape,” contemptuously characterizing such concerns as “a matter for women to deal with.” By the mid-1970s, however, the opinion expressed, for example, by environmentally enlightened banker Louis B. Lundborg in the Los Angeles Times was not at all uncommon: “We have not reached this point of [incipient environmental catastrophe] entirely by accident: for a long time the concept of planned obsolescence has been accepted as a deliberate and admirable philosophy of management.”86 The essence of the environmental argument against planned obsolescence was that it is objectionable not because it is unfair to consumers but rather because of its material consequences—the production of evergreater volumes of waste.

This emerging environmental framing of the problem with planned obsolescence had some precedent in worries expressed in the 1960s about solid waste disposal. Vance Packard, in The Waste Makers, makes reference to the growing problem of waste accumulation and resource depletion, although these issues are certainly not central to his critique. A number of pieces in newspapers, appearing in the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, presented the growing problem of waste disposal as being a consequence of planned obsolescence.87 Dr. Merril Eisenbud, head of New York City’s EPA, attributed what he described as a “trash crisis” to the “built-in death dates and planned obsolescence of many of the commercial products we buy.”88 In a 1966 New York Times article, entitled “Help! The Junk Is Rising,” the blame for the growing problem of solid waste disposal is put squarely on planned obsolescence. After a tirade against the practice, the piece concludes: “‘Don’t complain’, someone will object, ‘it’s afluence.’ And yet the junk is getting deeper. Surely it is written someplace that the country that lives by obsolescence shall perish of its own junk.”89 By the early 1970s, concern in government about the problem of solid waste disposal had been building for a number of years, and planned obsolescence was seen as the main source of the problem. Richard D. Vaughan, director of the U.S. Bureau of Solid Waste Management argued that the solution was to be found in a change in production, stressing the need to redesign “American consumer goods with repair in mind in order to move away from planned obsolescence.”90

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The rise of environmentalism led to calls for legislative and other government initiatives to regulate planned obsolescence. A nongovernmental organization of researchers and businessmen, the National Commission on Materials Policy, issued a report in 1973 suggesting the need for “counterincentives to planned obsolescence,” in order to combat environmental degradation.91 In 1973, the Muskie bill (sponsored by Senator Edmund S. Muskie, a trailblazer for environmental legislation), which addressed the problem of solid waste disposal, incorporated a provision for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Ofice of Solid Waste Disposal “to specify the useful life of such major items as tires, appliances and vehicles to discourage planned obsolescence.”92

In the early 1970s, the energy crisis was added to the growing list of reasons for rejecting planned obsolescence. “The reasons for the profligate American use of energy are basic,” wrote prominent public intellectual and journalist Anthony Lewis in a New York Times article: “They include the dominant place of automobiles in transportation, the suburban pattern of living, the emphasis on energy intensive rather than labor intensive industry and the economics of planned obsolescence.”93 Similarly, an article about the challenges facing the US economy against the backdrop of the oil shock leaves its readers with the following warning: “The policy of planned obsolescence which pervades manufacturing is another source of great waste. A slogan of ‘make it do, wear it out, and do without’ might help this situation. Our children are going to be left with many serious problems as a result of our profligate waste.”94

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