Stuff You Should Know - Planned Obsolescence: Engine of the Consumer Economy

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

If you’ve ever heard an old timer gripe that things aren’t built like they used to be, that old timer was right! Learn about the nefarious, possibly mythical, mechanism that’s responsible for the cruddy products and waste our consumer society is based on. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we're coming to see you soon. Yeah, especially, first of all, Toronto and Chicago. And Toronto hats off to you guys. Tickets are selling like gangbusters. Chicago, I don't know what's going on with you.

I know Chicago. What became of you, Chicago? I thought you loved us. Yeah, really? With your cool hot dogs and your thick pizzas. Yeah, and I mean, that's really all you need to mention about Chicago. So we're gonna be at the Harris Theater on July 24th.

That is very soon. We are going to be the next day in Toronto at the lovely Danforth Music Hall on July 25th. And then that's not all, is it? No, that's not all, Chuck. We're also going to be going to Boston in August, followed by Portland, Maine, which is on purpose, by the way. That's right, Wilbur Theater in Boston,

the State Theater in Portland, Maine. We're headed to Florida for the first time, everyone, Central Florida at the Plaza Live in Orlando on October 9th. And then the next night, October 10th, at the Civic Theater in New Orleans. And then we're gonna wrap it all up and spank it on the bottom with our annual trio of shows at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, October 23, 24, and 25.

And the 25th is almost sold out. Yep, so you can get tickets to all of these shows by going to sysklive.com, our home on the web for touring. And that will send you out to all the great little sites that have links to the tickets and info and everything you need. So we will see you very soon, starting this July. Welcome to Step You Should Know,

a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and there's Jerry over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know, built to break edition. Okay, I didn't, I was not paying attention when you said which one we were doing. And I thought, you know what?

I'm just gonna pick up on the clues. Wow. Well, right out of the gate, when did you have it? When I said there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant? I planned to break. Oh, okay, gotcha. That was pretty sharp, Chuck. Hey, man, after 11-ish years, it's as easy as that.

You can read my mind. So let's talk about the Civil Air Patrol. He just threw me off. Luckily, it wasn't enough for me to stop and correct you, though. I'm excited about this one, because planned obsolescence is one of those things that's, I think, just annoying to people like us. Were you raised with the idea of planned obsolescence?

Like, were you aware of it when you were younger? No, because when I was a kid, things seemed to last longer. I got the same refrigerator my entire life as a child. Same metallic P refrigerator. We even got it, like, refaced. Like, that's how long you could have an appliance like that. It's like the styles have changed. So just get a new front for it.

That's astounding, man. I didn't even know that you could do that. Yeah, I mean, I doubt if you still can. No, you definitely can't. Yeah, back then, they were like, yeah, this is a 50-year fridge. So every 25 years, get a new thing on the front. Yeah.

Well, if you're sitting there going agar, when Chuck said 50-year fridge, that's okay. That's the world we live in now. The point is, it didn't used to be that way. Things used to last forever and ever, right? So what changed? That's a big question that's on people's mind and what a lot of people point to

is something called planned obsolescence, which is pretty straightforward if you think about it. It's basically companies deliberately making their products so that they last a shorter amount of time in order to make you, the consumer, have to go back and buy another one much sooner than you normally would have if the things were built to last longer.

Yeah, and there are a lot of ways that this can go down. It's not always just like, hey, build it cheap or build it out of cruddy materials, but that is certainly one way to do it. Right, yep. Obviously, with the smartphones and the technology sector of the world, that's where you really hear a lot about this because I know a lot of people

have been frustrated with smartphones and the fact that like, hey, maybe I wanna go five years with a smartphone and not have a new update, make it slow or not have my battery not work after three years and stuff like that. Right, and I mean, it shouldn't have to be like an identity statement to keep a phone for five years, like you're swimming against the current

or sticking it to the man. Right. Like, you should just be able to keep your phone for as long as you like and it's still not only continue to work, but also to be compatible with the rest of the world going on around it. Yeah. That's just not the case.

That's just not how things are made, especially in the technology sector like you were saying. Right, and here's the thing is it's like, this is something that a company is not gonna admit to. It's not against the law. Some people say it's a myth and it's just like tinfoil hat territory. Other people say, no, it clearly totally happens.

Yeah. And then other people even say, yeah, it happens, but this is great for the economy to keep people making stuff all the time. Right. So there's this idea of, you know, is planned obsolescence a real thing? And if it is real,

because I think you kind of touched on it with that third group, some people are like, yeah, it is real, but it's not like deliberate and out of like a sense of avarice or exploitation. It's just kind of part of the world we live in these days. I think a lot of people that are like, no, it is real and it is deliberate and it is out of avarice.

And it stinks. It does stink. We'll find that there's a lot, there's a lot wrong with it, right? Yeah, so this early light bulb story is pretty interesting. Way back when Thomas Edison invented a light bulb in the late 1800s that people could use in their homes,

he used carbon filaments, which were eight times thicker than the tungsten filaments that came like later, like three decades later. So these things lasted a long time and they were built to last. And I can't believe I'm 48 years old and I never had heard of the centennial light,

which is a light bulb from 1901 that is still working in California. Yeah, and a fire station in California and it's on almost all the time. It's not like they turn it off for 35 years at a stretch. Now, you probably wouldn't want to turn it off at this point, I would say. Probably not.

That's probably the only reason it's working is because it doesn't know, it doesn't have to. Right. They've got like the scotch tape over the light switch with like do not turn off breading on it. It's dim now though. I saw that it's down to about a nightlight, four watts or so.

Well, it's been burning for 118 years. Give it a break. Hey man, I'm not knocking the centennial light. He's my favorite little old light buddy. Not in my presence at least. But yeah, I mean that thing, point is they were built to last and initially this is because electric companies installed and maintained all these systems,

including like, hey, you need a new bulb, like we'll come and take care of it for you. Yeah. And then that got shifted to the consumer and they were like, hey. And they literally were like, hey, because there was a concerted effort that wasn't just like some abstract thought.

There was something called the Phoebus cartel in the 1920s when all these electric companies from around the world and bulb manufacturers got together and literally colluded and said, hey, let's make light bulbs not last as long because we can sell more. Yeah, collusion. Can you believe that?

I can actually believe it very much so. Not only, it is not like they got together, like they sent some letters or smoke some cigars or happen to have like a conversation, a club or something like that. Like they met in Geneva, Switzerland to hold a secret meeting to form a light bulb cartel. To make light bulbs last a shorter amount of time

so they could sell more. It's just, it happened. Yeah. I mean, that's very much proof if you're like planned obsolescence isn't really a thing. Like there's proof that at one point it was definitely a thing. It was a thing in one of the earliest industries

around in the post-industrial age. Yeah. So the light bulb cartel kind of, it definitely, it's not like that just kicked off everything where everybody was like, oh yeah, that's what we're gonna do from now on. It's almost like the impression I got is that this is an independent idea

that was just kind of cropped up throughout the course of the 20th century. But the next people that hit upon it, I think I don't, it's entirely possible that these guys were all sharing info. You know, the light bulb guys were like, hey, you car makers are being idiots. Here's what you need to do.

Yeah, they're all the same places in the cat skills every summer. That's what I would guess. Seeing that young upcoming comedian, Kenny Youngman do his bit. Yeah. So the automakers were the first to hit on it next. And specifically a guy named Alfred P. Sloan

who was a groundbreaking early president of General Motors who said, I've got an idea. We could sell way more cars. If we just make little updates here or there, every year to the same car, but just change it out enough so that you want the newer car. It's newer, it's flashier.

It's better than the car you own. So maybe after a couple of years, somebody will take their car that still works just fine and trade it in for a new one. And he's the guy who came up with that. Yeah, that's called dynamic obsolescence. And I mean, now we take it for granted because that's all you hear about is the new model year.

But previous to that, I mean, I'd love to do a show on the early auto industry. I guess they just made cars and they were called the whatever. And I mean, when did they make new ones? Every five or six, seven years when they had a real innovation? Well, he had this idea in like the 20s or 30s. So they weren't, they wouldn't have been cars

for that many years. For very long, yeah, before them. But I think it was just like the Model T or the Model A or the box with wheels, you know? Which all of those were, right? Yeah, the actual term though, planned obsolescence was in a pamphlet for the first time in 1932, written by a real estate broker named Bernard London.

And this pamphlet was called, you know, it's 1932, if it's like the big pamphlet writing days. Right. You don't get enough of those anymore. You really don't see too many pamphlets outside of like a government office or something. Right, or if you're in Vegas and it's just got, you know, you know what door it goes.

Those kind of pamphlets. Right. But this was in 1932 and it was called ending the depression through planned obsolescence. So right there, it's in the title, first time it had ever been used. And this was a plan for products to include an artificial expiration date.

So the idea was if you're a consumer and you continue to use that product beyond that date, sort of like, you know, taking an old pill or drinking old milk, except you would be charged a tax like, hey, you're still using that fridge. It's two years past its date, so you got to pay a tax on that now.

Right. And it did not take hold, surprisingly, or unsurprisingly. Right, but there's, supposedly from what I saw, there's 15 copies of that pamphlet known to exist still and they're all in libraries. And there were 20 originally. Right, exactly.

But Bernard London, he had, you know, he had kind of an idea, but it was misplaced. It was in the wrong place. It was like, nobody wants to tax the consumer for using an item they paid for fair and square. That's just, that's not gonna be a very popular idea. So he had, he was kind of on the right path, but he found a tree and he started barking up it

and it was the wrong one. You know what I mean? Yeah, but that was, in fact, that same year, there were two other guys, Roy Sheldon, and this is a great name, Eggmont Arons. And they wrote a book that wasn't too far off that pamphlet called Consumer Engineering colon, or lease of a colon and a title.

A new technique for prosperity. And they called it creative waste and just basically flat out said, we should make things that are less durable because, you know, people are gonna buy more stuff. Right. That was in 1932. Yeah, which, I mean, lays the foundation

for the consumer economy that we live in today. Like that's it right there. These guys came up with the basis of it. Yeah, and it got me thinking about like, when you, there are places that make really awesome things that are like their selling point is, this is really built to last. Right.

Whether it's a wallet or, you know, a piece of clothing or something. No, there are these, you know, there are these high end wallet makers now that are saying like, this is the wallet that you can have for 60 years like your father. I didn't know about that. But they often say things like, you know,

use military grade fabrics or this or that. And I think that's just like back then, they used to use the highest grade. Right. And calling it military grade sounds all fancy, but what that really means is we use stuff like they used to because it just lasts. And now only the military does that kind of thing.

You know? Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, that's what Bernard London and Roy Sheldon and Eggma Arons, the foundation of their ideas, even though they were separate ideas, was that things were made too well back then. And Bernard London's idea was, well, you can just keep making them really well,

but you have to say that you can't use it beyond this date, which wouldn't work. But Roy Sheldon and Eggma Arons said, well, we could go the opposite way and just make stuff less durable. Right. And sell more of it. That's the whole point to stimulate the economy.

Cause remember, both these were written during the depression and their idea was to stimulate the economy by artificially creating repeat customers that otherwise wouldn't exist because the stuff that you would go by is too durable. Like if you go buy a hose and that hose is going to last you for the rest of your life

and you're not in a business where you need multiple hoses, you're just a homeowner. You're not in the hose business? You're a hose maker. Well, I'm actually referring specifically to a hose that my dad bought from Sears in the 60s. He still got it. He still had it until the 90s and it sprung a leak

and Sears used to guarantee everything that they sold for a lifetime. My dad took it back to his Sears and they gave him another hose in the 90s, right? So, but the idea of a hose lasting 30 something years let alone being replaced when it, you know for free when it breaks, like that was the problem. Stuff was just made too well.

And you can actually go on to like Etsy and eBay and sites like that today, Chuck. And there's like a whole like subculture, I guess of people who buy vintage appliances that still work. They work like they did the day you bought them. Like I saw a Sunbeam mixer from 1930 and it says like works perfectly well, has a few scuffs on it, that's it.

From 1930, that's coming up on 100 years ago. Yeah, it also weighs 275 pounds. And it catches your house on fire. So you'll have to pay a lot of money to have it shipped. But yeah, I mean, it's crazy because that was this early planned obsolescence was in the 30s and 40s when we think of that's when they were making great stuff.

And like now it's progressed to the point where it's just like, let's just make pure garbage. Right. That won't last a year. The point originally was that, that it would stimulate the economy if you could sell the same person's stuff multiple times over their life,

rather than making something that lasts a generation so that they only have to buy the one hose for their lifetime, right? Well, your dad has two nicknames now, the Herbal Elvis and one hose, one hose Clark. One hose Clark. All right, shall we take a break? I think so.

All right, let's take a break and we're gonna come back and talk about a man named brick Stevens right after this. Get to this shit. On the podcast Paydude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the bone classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and baybed Employment.

We're gonna use Hey dude as our jumping off point, we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. S-Y-Y-S-K-S-K. All right, so this idea is out there.

Plan Dobbs-A-Lessons. It's been written down. It's a term. It really kind of became more common in the 1950s, even though it was first written about in the early 1930s. And this is where a man named Brooks Stevens enters. He was a Milwaukee industrial designer and he did a lot of stuff.

He worked in the automobile industry. He worked in the appliance industry. And basically his whole jam was, no, no, no, we need to make things obsolete and not last very long because this is good for industry. Right, let's go get that bread. Yeah, go get that bread and keep people working, keep people making stuff.

At a 1954 advertising conference, he gave a speech where he said, quote, instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary, end quote. Yeah. It's right there. Just make it a little crappier, a little crudier,

and you'll sell more of them over a long period of time. Like you can take the long view of it. And like if you are looking at it strictly from like an economic sense, like an academic sense, this just makes like total sense. It's perfectly normal and rational and kind of a good idea.

But when you put it into practice, we've found, there's a lot of problems that start to emerge pretty quickly and emerge so quickly that Brooks Stevens gave that very famous speech, well, famous among industrial designers, but he made that speech in 1954. By 1960, six years later, there was a popular book by a guy named Vance Packard called The Wastemakers.

And it was basically about all the problems that come from that kind of mentality that planned obsolescence creates, all the waste associated with it, all the unnecessary consumerism, all the keeping up with the Joneses that emerges, like just six years after that speech. So really quickly, people started to see the problems

with planned obsolescence, like right out of the gate. Yeah, this Vance Packard, I think maybe we could try and do a short stuff on. Yeah, easily. Just kind of reading up on him. He was sort of a pre Ralph Nader social critic. And I guess Nader was a little more toward like public safety, but Vance Packard, he wrote a bunch of cool books and essays,

one called The Hidden Persuaders that tackled the advertising industry and subliminal advertising and stuff like that. He was like the arch enemy of Edward Bernays, I imagine. Yeah, those one called an essay called The Naked Society, which had to do in the 1960s, I think about consumer privacy. Yeah, so like way ahead of his time.

Yeah. And then the last thing he wrote in 1989 was called The Ultra Rich, Colin, how much is too much? How much is too much? Yeah, so he died a few years later, like up until the very end was kind of fighting a good fight for saying what a wasteful, invasive, gross society that we're building here in the United States.

Yeah, it was an interesting dude. Definitely the kind of author that guys like Gladwell and Friedman and all of them sort of followed in the footsteps of, but he kind of laid the groundwork for that kind of reporting on kind of the ugliness of the society that sold to us. I think we should definitely do a short stuff on him. Yeah.

Okay, so pinky swear? Pinky swear. Okay. Ooh, your pinky's cold. I don't know if that's soothing to me or frightening. It should be a little frightening. I'm frightened by it because it feels sweaty. Guys, I think Josh is dead.

My nose just falls off onto the table. Oh God. Oh, let me put that back. No problem. The funny thing is, as long as you could keep podcasting I'd probably be like, that's fine. You'd be fine, yeah.

I like corpse, Josh. You buy me like a steel rod to go in my spine for Christmas. Yeah, but I'd have to buy one every couple of years because they don't last like they used to. It's true. They don't last like they used to. That's another thing. I really, really want to say this, Chuck,

because I'm sure to, especially some of our younger listeners, we sound like a couple of little fogies who's like, they don't make it like they used to. No, it's proven. They don't make things like they used to. It's not just people like pining for the good old days or anything like that.

Like there is a definite progression of increasing cruddiness among the stuff you buy and the shortening in the lifespan and durability of the things we buy, it's just happening. Yeah, it's funny when I see stuff on social media about people complaining about their fridge that doesn't work or this or that and like, what about the lemon law?

I'm always just like, oh, that's cute. I'm sure you're going to get real far with the lemon law. Although we should look into that for a short stuff too, because there is such a thing. I just don't know how, you know. I'm sure we've talked about it. We talked about it before. I swear we have.

Maybe in the, God, we even did a show years ago on. Extended warranties. Oh man. I hearken back to that show pretty frequently. Whenever I'm offered an extended warranty, I'm like, wow, that sounds like a really good deal. What did we say in the extended warranty episode? Oh yes, never get the extended warranty.

It's never worth it if I remember correctly. All right, so shall we chat a little bit about some of the worst offenders these days? Yeah, first up on the t-ball tee is Apple. Yeah, Apple is in the news a lot and is very much at the center of the talk among the skeptics and on the skeptics' websites about their evil plan to keep you on their machines

every couple of years through updates that slow down your phone, which was proven true. Yeah, well there's a class action lawsuit against them for it. Yeah, so here's what happened if you live under a rock. Apple got, they sent out an update, this was a few years ago, and the update was shown and they admitted that it did slow the phones down, but their whole response was,

hey, this is cause the battery stinks. They were like, we're trying to make your battery last longer, so we're slowing some things down in order to give you a better battery life. And then here's what we'll do, everyone. We're so sorry, you can buy a new battery for $50 cheaper for $29 instead of $79. So they replaced 11 million batteries in 2018.

Did they really? I didn't know that. Yeah, up from about, you know, replaced for $29 a piece. Sure, sure. Up from one to two million in an average year, because I don't know if you've ever seen an iPhone, but it doesn't have a little switch on the back that you just pop a little thing and put a new battery in.

No, no, that's another big part of Planned Ops is that we'll talk about is there is a strict control over the product even after it's purchased. Oh yeah, they want to control it through repair, through everything. Yeah. So I was looking up on this lawsuit because I didn't know where it landed,

and I think it's still going on. And the latest article I read was from February that said basically Apple is squirreling away money because they're going to lose this thing. Oh yeah. I'm sure it will. And like literally setting aside money to pay for this lawsuit.

That's so cute for a rainy day. Yeah, they've like opened up a new account. They went down to the bank and said, just call it lawsuit account. But here's the thing with Apple. It's not just the update thing, like anyone who has bought a laptop from them, like me lately, or one of the newer phones,

and you're like, oh wait a minute, I can't plug, like I've done since I had my Walkman, I can't plug my headphones into this thing anymore without buying a little dongle, or I can't plug in a USB port because there is none unless I get some little adapter that they also sell. Right. So that's a classic hallmark of Planned Obsolescence

is creating a newer model that is incompatible with older models. So if you wanna keep using the older model, you're gonna have to shell out some money one way or another, or even if you buy the newer model, which is kind of an even bigger slap in the face, you have to shell out even more money for additional peripherals like chargers

or headphones or something like that to make them compatible. Just making stuff incompatible with older versions, it's a big part of Planned Obsolescence. Yeah, do you know, I wonder how much money they made on the little headphone adapter. Oh man, it's 10 bucks, it's like $9.99. I've got one and I'm like,

you know, I could really use another one of those because the worst thing that can possibly happen to a human being is to have two sets of headphones, one for like, you know, the flight on Delta, and then one for your phone because they have two different ends on them. So I mean, to have to keep up with two sets of headphones is basically as horrible as it gets.

So I'm probably just gonna cave and get another adapter. Yeah, or just quit ingesting culture. Yeah, well. And get a flip phone. Yeah. And stop watching movies and TV altogether. Yep, sticking it to the man. The other, one other big offender that really gets my goat,

and I know we are old guys complaining here, that's fine, but the old and young alike, I think can all agree that printer cartridges are one of the biggest, most frustrating, wasteful and environmentally damaging scams on the planet. Yeah, which I didn't know about this. So I've got a, I'm just gonna go ahead and buzz them because I'm pretty proud of what we got

at an Epson printer at home. And it has like reservoirs that you fill with ink. Oh man. Then hold a ton of ink from like a refill bottle. And there's no cartridges involved or anything like that. The bottles that you refill it from are fully recyclable. It's just, is this good? Before we had cartridges,

but it didn't have this particular component, which is a smart chip. Right. So what I'm trying to say is I had no idea this existed until I researched this. But some printers, inkjet laser printers, home printers, the cartridges have a little chip on them, which is I guess what you pull the tape off

of when you load it into the printer, like a new cartridge. And it actually talks to the printer and says, here's how much ink I have left. What are you gonna do this Friday? Oh yeah, oh wait, I got another job coming in, excuse me. And then eventually the ink level gets down to a certain amount where the smart chip tells the printer, no more printing.

They've reached the preset amount. Not the amount where they've actually run out of ink, but the amount that the company has determined is enough. You can go buy another cartridge now. And these cartridges also, the smart chips prevent you from using other companies cheaper knockoff cartridges because the chips won't communicate with the printer. So it's like the printer doesn't know the cartridge is there

and you can't refill them. They're designed not to be refilled. So they have to be thrown away and you have to go buy another cartridge. Yeah, and I've had that happen before in the past where I get down to if I'm printing something out and it just like simple black text and it starts to come out a little brown

and then it just stops. I'm like, I'm okay if it's a little brown. Right, I decide what's a legible printer. I know. So there are, at the very least I can tell you Epson makes a printer out there that has reservoirs that you can refill with bottles and no smart chips. Okay, give me some money Epson.

The auto industry is still kind of doing the same thing that they started so many years ago which is discontinuing parts that could keep cars running for a longer time, making those minor cosmetic changes for that new model year, retiring models of cars that are really, really popular just because they wanna bring out something new

and make it harder to fix your old car. So Repair Chuck like we kind of teased earlier, that's a huge part of planned obsolescence. Like if you're the company that controls the market on your parts and who can repair your products with those parts, you have a, you're basically saying like I can see this product through after I sell it to the customer

to ensure that it experiences just that artificially short lifetime. Yeah, and the thing that's so maddening about this is you can just hear it in the meeting rooms, you know? Yeah. That like, and here's the best thing guys, we control the parts, we control the repair. Like the only thing we don't control is the shipping

and maybe we can make some deal with FedEx on that to get a little kickback. Exactly. I don't know if that really happens, I'm just making it up. It probably does. Now I've got my tinfoil hat on. But you can just hear it in the meeting rooms

and that's what's so frustrating is it's just this ooze, this steady ooze of greed with no regard for the consumer at all. Right. And just to lay it out, basically, you know, in explicit terms, if you're a company and you make a product, you can control that product after you sell it by saying, if you take this product,

if this product breaks and you take it anywhere, but where we say you can, say like to the Apple store or an authorized repair shop, you voided the warranty. So there's no warranty after that, you just voided it. And by doing that, they can say they control what parts are used, which means that they can be the only people who manufacture the parts that are used. Yeah, and then you say, can I fix under warranty

through you? Then they're like, oh, we don't cover that under warranty. They're like warranty you moron. With the repair parts controlled, they can raise the price or lower the price, they can adjust it however they want to make it so that it's actually as expensive to repair as it is to just buy another one or close to it,

to just basically nudge you toward, well, just throw this one away and get the newer model. Or they can also, this is a really big one, especially also in the auto industry, they can stop making those parts, which are the only parts that you can use to repair. So it ultimately eventually becomes impossible to repair that thing because all the parts,

the finite amount of parts that were ever produced to repair them are all used up. There's no more parts available, go buy the newer model. Did you see that used Ugo, the new used Ugo? No. Someone put a Ugo on eBay that had 480 miles on it. Wow. And had been garaged since it was,

since 1988 or whatever. How much do they want for it? Nine grand is what it sold for. Wow. It's nine grand plus you got to get that thing going again. Just, it's been sitting there for that many years. It's clearly not road ready, but it was cherry. And I think it's kind of funny that some, no doubt,

tech bro with a little too much money wanted the most ironic car in San Francisco. That is as ironic as it gets for sure. Every time I hear about Ugo's Chuck, I'm reminded of, remember that Saturday Night Live commercial for the Adobe? No. It was like the first car under $1,000.

It was made out of clay. Made out of clay. So when you got an offender banner, you just pour water on it and mold it back into shape. If only. Yeah. That was from like the Phil Hartman era. That's the opposite of planned obsolescence.

It is. Clothing is sort of the same deal that they make. And again, there are some clothing companies and I think more than ever now in recent years, well, not more than ever, but more than in the last 20 years, there are companies that are making really well-made clothes, but they're not cheap. There are many, many more companies,

huge, huge stores and big brands that are just pumping out cheap clothes because you're like, first of all, the styles change. So why do you want something? You don't want anything that's gonna last more than a year or two anyway. Right. But my beef, and we're calling out a lot of brands,

might as well just keep it going. But when I was younger, you could buy a pair of Levi's and have those for a long, long, long time. Yeah. And a Russian would trade you a Ugo forum. Yeah, exactly. And now like I had a pair of Levi's for probably five months before I got a big rip in them.

That is sad. It's sad. Levi Strauss rolled over in his grave on that day. I know, man, because that was the thing. It's just like these things are tough as leather. Sure. It'll last you so long. Like there's nothing better than inheriting

dad's old Levi's and it's just like, you know, or five months. Yeah, that's pretty sad to hear. Is there a middle ground? Can I get five years? Yeah, five years would be pretty good for some jeans. I'd take it. I always put, although I do less than I did before,

but my jeans would always wear out or my two thighs, my big fat thighs rubbed together. That's what would go first. But then you can hide that for a little while until one day you can't. Right. You just hope that that day comes and you're not in public.

I'm going to patch these because they're still comfortable, but you know. You shouldn't have to, Chuck. I shouldn't have to. That's a commie talk. I'm going to patch these. You want to know another racket? Yeah, yes.

Or should we take a break and talk about it? We could take a break if you want. Or we can wait. Do you want to wait? Yeah, we'll go, we'll finish the rackets. This is fun, by the way. I'm having fun like complaining about how stuff doesn't last like it used to.

How about the college textbook racket? Okay. Hey, this is a new addition from the previous year. Oh, what's different? The page numbers. Right. So by the new one. Yep.

Not the used one. Yeah, which is, I mean, like if you're trying to follow along in class, that's kind of maddening because the information's usually not that much, but it's enough to just throw everything off, right? Right. Whereas if they just put these things as like a supplement or an appendix or something in back,

then you could just, or even to sell the additional stuff separately, you could, it'd be a lot better. Yeah, you could sell the little pamphlet for $8.99 and probably make money. Yeah, 15 copies. How about the toy industry? So the toy industry is frequently guilty,

and this isn't the case across the board, but it kinda is, of a specific subcategory of planned obsolescence called contrived durability. And they're not the only- It's called garbage product. Basically. And the toy industry isn't the only one that does it, but they're the ones that come to mind

when you talk about this. And this is purposefully using inferior parts that just aren't going to last for very long at all. Especially the functioning parts, the stuff that moves or where the most stress is. Anybody who's ever gotten a switchblade comb and spent a half an hour just opening it and closing it, opening it and closing it,

and then it breaks on the 50th time, that comb was most likely made through a process of contrived durability. Right. And it's a big problem. Part of the problem is, that's another really good example of a type of item that is just, are you gonna take a switchblade comb

into the switchblade comb repair shop? Yeah. And if you did, how much would they charge you? Would it be any more than you paid, for like the three ping pong balls that you managed to get into like a goldfish bowl where you won the switchblade comb from? I don't think so.

Right, and actually we'll talk a little bit about some of the problems after this break here in a sec, but just an early, early shout to the death of the repair person. Yeah. And you died. Yeah, there are still some of those things, but like, try and find a TV repair shop near you.

Well, yeah, try to find one that's open too is the other thing. And you can still find them in any given large city, but it's not like it used to be where it was just like, oh, in any downtown, there's a locksmith, there's a tailor, there's a TV repaired person, and or any kind of repair shop. Yeah, there are very few and far between,

but that may be changing as we'll see. All right, let's take that break. Okay, thank goodness. I had a lot of anxiety building up because I knew that break was looming. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

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S-W-Y-S-K-S-K-S-K. All right, Chuck. So I feel like we've kind of hit upon the idea that planned obsolescence can be problematic. But let's talk specifically about the problems it does produce, right? Yeah, I mean, one of the big, well, first of all, let's throw out some stats just so people know we're not just

being angry. OK. There was a study about four years ago in 2015 by a company in Germany, the Urco Institute. Nice. No E on the end of Institute, which is so German-looking. Really? Because it's Institute otherwise.

They found obsolescence was on the rise. Percentage of electrical and electronic products sold that were replaced because they broke within five years rose from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012. And then household appliances, which is one of the big gripes for people because those are high-dollar items that you want to last 15 years.

Large household appliances had to be replaced within five years, grew from 7% to 13%, doubled between 2004 and 2013. And this is a really rare study. Most of the evidence about this stuff is anecdotal. Like if you ever get your hands on an appliance or a pair guy who comes out, they will talk ad nauseam about how they literally don't make things like they used to and that the lifespan is like two to three years, five years

if you're lucky, but prices are still really high. Like it used to be like, OK, I'm going to shell out some money for a really good fridge. And you could tell basically by the price of the fridge how long it was going to last. That ended a decade or two ago. You can still pay a significant amount of money for a fridge that has like a one-year warranty.

And it's going to last three to five years, even though you spent a significant amount of money. It's crazy. Yeah. Sometimes those appliance repair people will get specific too. I don't know if you've ever had this happen where they don't have to say like, oh, these things are junk now. They'll say like, oh, you know what they started doing

is four years ago, they started making this part out of plastic. And I'd see the same repair over and over and over now. Right. And it costs X amount for them to even come out and diagnose the problem. X amount to put in the new part. And then you also have to pay for the part. And depending on the appliance, I mean,

if it's a $1,500 or $2,000 refrigerator, $500 might be worth it rather than replacing it. But your $1,500 refrigerator just became a $2,000 refrigerator like 18 months later, right? Yeah. So that's part of the problem is the cost of repair when it is available can be a problem. But if your refrigerator does manage the last five years

and they stop making replacement parts for it four years after four years, you're out of luck after five years because you can't repair it anymore like we talked about. Yeah, we had a dishwasher that broke a lot from the first year that we had it. And it got to that point where I kept paying to repair it and getting angrier. And Emily was eventually like, neither one of us are like,

oh, just get the new one. But she was like, dude, we're spending more. Like we could have bought the new one for what we're spending on repairs because you're being stubborn about saying this thing should last longer. But you get in that sort of conundrum where you don't know what the right thing to do is. Yeah, and eventually just about anybody's

going to be like, fine, I've spent more money than it would have cost or replaced. Yeah, everybody's going to cry uncle eventually. I think it's just some people do it faster than others. Yeah, one of the other things with plan obsolescence is a company can, it's very rare that a company is just that company. Usually they're owned by some huge Uber company.

That owns many of that company's, that brand's rivals. Yeah, so you can just, if something gets a bad rep, you can just retire that brand and slap a new name on it. And it's the kind of the same thing. So you don't know anymore if it's a good or a bad brand. Right, and if you just have a couple of mega brands and they're all doing the same thing with their multiple brands that they all own, which is they're just all making

crud that lasts maybe three to five years, then that means that there's actually technically no bad brand. They're all bad brands. Cause there's also no good brand either. And they just trade on these brand names that you were raised to hear from your parents or from a repairman or whatever that that's a good brand, but this brand's not any good.

And then you have like a bad experience with that brand. So you switch to another brand, but there's a pretty good chance that those same, those two brands are still owned by the same company to whom it's all the same. You're still giving them the money ultimately. Yeah, I, I'm sorry. This is filled with so many anecdotal stories,

but I was TV shopping recently. And there was a TV that seemed like a really good deal and it got good ratings on all the places. But then you start reading the customer experience and like a lot of people were saying, this has a banding issue where you can see like lines on the screen when the screen is darker and stuff like that. Oh yeah, yeah.

It was like ubiquitous. It was all over the place in these reviews and every single one of them, the manufacturer would reply and say, boy, we're so sorry you had this experience. We've never heard of this. And it's certainly an outlier. So get in touch with us.

And it's just so madding. It's like, no man, it's like 30% of these reviews say this. And I say that sometimes when I'm, when I have to call about something like that, I'm like, man, I know it's not like, I'm not the only person this is happening to. It's all over the internet. And they're just like, well,

we're not allowed to share stuff like that, sir. I have to say in my experience, so Chuck, one thing that has gotten better over the last couple of decades is customer service. Do you think? Yeah, I think for the average person, the companies want to please customers enough that they make the experience of dealing with them

better than it was before. I think. Boy, I'm gonna have to think about that. Okay, think about it. Maybe some companies, I've had the experience with some that are so big that you get the feeling that like, they think it costs more to give a hoot.

Right, yeah. I think that's definitely true out there, but there's so many like, I think smaller companies and tech startups come from this place of like, we treat the customer really well. That's just what we do. It just seems to be more than there was before.

Whereas before it seems like it was all big companies that you had to deal with and they all had terrible customer service. I think the 90s were like the zenith of bad customer service if I'm not mistaken. Maybe so. So there's a really important point that we're kind of dancing around here, right?

Like, 13% of large appliances breaking within five years and having to be replaced. Like 8.3% of smaller electronics are all electronics. Those things being thrown out, it doesn't sound like that much, but when you actually translate it into numbers, you're talking about millions of things, of items, of products that are being thrown away

because they broke. And the vast majority of those things are just, like I said, thrown away. They're not recycled. I think in the United States, 6% of small appliances are recycled, which is a paltry amount. That means the rest just go into landfill.

Yeah, and it's especially egregious because not only is all this stuff getting tossed, but e-waste are some of the biggest offenders as far as environmental damage. So you've got 350 million ink cartridges in the United States tossed in landfills every year. Yeah. You know, 348 million of which aren't even empty.

Right, because of those smart chips. You got, you know, refrigerators being thrown out. We did get a new refrigerator a couple of years ago, even though our old one that we bought used was still working. It was kind of a workhorse, but we sold it. And I was like, you know, sold it really cheap. I was like, I bought this thing used.

It lasted us 10 years without problems. So someone's getting a good old workhorse here for a couple hundred bucks. Nice. So, you know, we try and recycle our stuff or sell it or donate it these days. Or at least set it on fire so it's not somebody else's problem.

The good news is though, I don't want this to all be poo-poo, is there are places in the world that are working on this and trying to change things. Yeah. Not here in the United States, of course, but in Europe, they are working on creating some standards. There's a program called Eco Design Directive,

which would basically open up regulation of industry based on, you know, what they're trying to do is set new standards for durability and repairability and like make it the law. Right. Yeah. Like they're, the resource efficiency is what they're calling it. Like you have energy efficiency,

like how much water does that dishwasher use? This is how long does this thing last? Like put it on the label. Right, exactly. Kind of like that Bernard London's idea, but rather than it being an expiration date to where you start to get charged for using it beyond that date, this is,

oh, well, this one's gonna last five years. This one says it lasts seven. I'm gonna go with the seven year one. Right. And because of the resources these things use, the seven year one is more efficient by definition than the five year one. And at least you can make an informed choice as a consumer.

Right. Here in the States, like I said, the federal government isn't doing anything, but when it comes to the states, there are some groups. There's one movement called Right to Repair started in the UK and is now catching hold, I think in 2018, there were 18 states that introduced Right to Repair bills,

some of which have taken hold, some of which haven't, but it basically requires companies to make it possible to repair their devices on their own or take it to a repair mom and pop repair shop and not have like the warranty voided. Yeah, these laws all kind of, they're different, but they have in common the idea that, okay, if you guys are gonna build junk,

at least make it easier for them to be repaired, like design them so a customer can repair them themselves or take them to an unauthorized repair shop. And those repair shops should be able to get their hands on parts that are as universal as possible. And you guys, the manufacturers should be supplying repair shops with repair manuals for them to reference, like stop doing the opposite of everything we just said

in order to make it hard to repair your stuff. If put out junk if you want, but let us repair it. That's kind of what the gist of those bills are. Yeah, and like we mentioned before, there is a segment of people that think, that firmly believe that this is all great for industry. It's all great for the economy. It keeps an army of employees working

at these cell phone companies and smartphone companies and designers and engineers because of that cycle. So, that's one way to look at it. If you turn over goods really quickly, then that's a lot more stuff that needs to be manufactured and a lot more trucks driving things. And it might be an environmental nightmare, but those trucks are moving.

Yeah, I mean, on the one hand though, I do agree with the idea of saying, okay, we want to replace, we want people to buy a new phone every three years. We have to give them a reason to buy a new phone every three years. And one of the outcomes of that is that technological innovation that is happening as a result of that.

Like just, you know, there's multiple phone companies all scrambling for market share. So, they're trying to out innovate one another and justify customers going and replacing their phones. But barely. Well, yeah, because there's other routes they can take, they can take, you know, the fast fashion clothing route and just do cosmetic updates to it

or like the Easy Bake Oven. It does the same thing, virtually the same thing from the beginning of its invention till today. It was just mainly cosmetic changes that were made to it over time to keep up with the times, just like fashion. If you do that with a phone or technology,

then yeah, you're a schlub, you're not doing your job. But ideally, if you release a new version of a phone every few years and it is just way better than the phone before, that's okay. Yes, there's still the manufacturing problem and the waste associated with it. That can be dealt with, but at least technology is being pushed forward.

At least it's not just a total scam, you know what I mean? Yeah, there's also the idea of value engineering, like kind of walking that line as a manufacturer to not make junk, but also to make something affordable for a consumer. And if we built a card to the last 75 years, no one would be able to afford it

because it would all be military grade materials. Or the same thing with a phone, like if this technological progress is happening so that a phone does actually become obsolete, whether planned or otherwise in a couple of years, it makes more sense to build phones with cheaper parts that aren't gonna last forever because then you have to replace a $500 phone

every few years rather than a $5,000 phone every few years too. Right, and the final point kind of is that the consumer does have a little bit of responsibility. It's a little bit all of our faults because you might want the new phone in that color when your other one works great. Yep.

There was a study by the same UCO Institute that said a third of all replacement purchases for things like fridges and washing machines were motivated by just having a newer, better unit even though their old one is still fine. Right. So like, you know, that's kind of on the consumer. Hit them with that last step, Chuck.

In 2012, more than 60% of TVs that were replaced were still functioning. Mike, drop. TVs, that's certainly a big one. Yeah, but I mean, the question is, did this like ravenous consumer society develop as a result of planned obsolescence or did planned obsolescence develop

to keep up with this ravenous consumer society? That's the question we'll leave you with. That is a big question. Yeah. Love to answer that. We don't have the answer. Well, while we try to figure it out, how about instead, let's listen to some listener mail

from Chuck. Yeah, this is a very, very sweet email from a gentleman named Tom about his daughter. Hey guys, thanks for being a positive influence on my daughter, Grace. She recently graduated from high school, will be attending the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, College of Biological Sciences,

majoring in Cellular and Organismal. I don't even know that word. Tom just made up a new word. Physiology? Is that a word? I guess I've never seen that before either. Organismal? Because of your shows.

Oh, here he says she's even making up new words. There you go. Because of your show's unique insight to learning, you fan the flames of desire for knowledge, that you routinely reinforce our awesome and cool knowledge and education can be. I started listening later, then she did to try and listen to an episode each way

and then tried to listen to an episode each way from work every day. I have heard you read listener mail from other parents that compliment how you always give us something to talk about with our kids. That is also true in our home. Recently on our vacation to go skiing in Colorado, we stopped at a pony express station in Nebraska.

That's awesome. Your influence is beyond academics too. She's involved in her community and articulates educated opinions for her passions. She will turn 18 this fall and is looking forward to voting. Many of the examples you give in your podcast have empowered her to take positions on social issues. I know you know, I hope you know the importance

and influence of your show, guys. We look forward to your show in Chicago. Nice. Yeah, so Tom and the family are coming to, from Rockford, Illinois to Chicago. Thanks, Tom. What was Tom's daughter's name again? Grace.

Grace, thank you very much for making us look so good. Yeah. And good luck in school, congrats. Good luck with that fake major. Yeah, we'll see you guys in Chicago. Oh, I guess that's it. If you want to get in touch with us, like Grace and Tom did, you can, what?

Chuck, go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links. Sure. And then you could also just send us an email. And if you want to do that, send it to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.