A Rant for All Seasons –

Why Do We Put Up with It?

Today I need to let off some steam, a good old fashioned 19th century expression. Did you know that when manufacturers make some products they deliberately build in features that mean either you can’t repair the product or that it has a limited lifespan, so they can sell you the next almost identical one in almost the next breath? It is called Planned Obsolescence and it is a very twentieth century idea.  It was designed to help manufacturers overcome the resistance of consumers to buying stuff they didn’t need. If you’ve heard your grandparents talk you’ll know that stuff generally speaking used to last longer, why because it was made to last. I was talking to a 94 year old lady on Sunday and she’d been to a tea plantation in Darjeeling recently and saw a machine made in Glasgow in 1874 and they were still using it.

Naughty, Naughty, Naughty

Once upon a time in America some industries had cartels, which are an illegal and closed business group who rig prices and products in the favour of the manufacturer. The Phoebus cartel was one, which rigged the durability and therefore value of light bulbs. If any manufacturer accidentally produced a bulb that lasted more than a 1,000 hours the cartel fined that manufacturer.  Yes it really happened. 

Not Always Smart

Making shoddy products of course is also a recipe for disaster if you look at what happed to the British Motor Industry which got eaten alive because the Japanese and Germans made cars that lasted and didn’t break down all the time. Planned obsolescence can backfire on you. So one other way was to redesign everything every year everything from a motorcar to Wee Jimmy’s football shirt. Trendsetters therefore can make you feel uncomfortable in your own skin just by saying ‘how old fashioned!’

The New Black!

Now of course the game changers are so much car s they are mobile phones, television and games consoles. If they try and sell you a 4k TV or camera, then ask yourself what is 4k and why do i need it when the human eye can only see 2k’s worth of detail. The 4 k refers to 4,000 horizontal pixels in the digital image. Why it only seems like two years ago when people were telling me that 2k was the way to future proof everything, oh it was! Oh and unless you are watching a High Definition channel all broadcasters transit even HD material at Standard Definition.  If have kids you’ll know that games manufacturers and games console manufacturers  are in an arms race to promote new consoles and new games and the old one you spent so much on is just left behind, grr!

Smart Phones, But Smart for Who?

Now the other way to make you spent your hard earned money is to make it almost impossible to repair something, like your mobile phone, and if you do by any chance repair it that repair will invalidate your warranty and no matter how much of a lemon your phone actually is, probably because it is made in a remote and inaccessible compound in China where workers get a mite depressed, you won’t be able to do much about it. Oh and by the way they have used special screws that can’t be opened by mere mortals to stop you accessing your own possessions! And if you buy cheaper, you might get some unwelcome passengers inside the phone with malware preinstalled into your lovely new and surprisingly low prices smart phone, yes it really happened. Manufacturers don’t want to make you happy they just want to sell you stuff as often as possible. They even have countdowns to the next product release. They’ll open a shop at midnight so you can be the first, yes be the first to walk down Buchanan or Princes Street after the last bus, with your new gadget you can’t use because it isn’t charged yet!

A Return to Proper Values

Well all of this thinking is so last century, really! What we need is a return to products that last as long as they should, with no gimmicks, unless we want a gimmick of course, and that if they need a repair can be fixed at an economic price. If you’ve looked under the bonnet of a car recently you’ll have noticed everything is sealed. You can’t access an individual part you have to replace a whole unit.  Why because really they don’t want you to repair it and they want to assemble it as far as possible away from the car plant. And all of this means Tommy down the little garage is getting priced out of the market and he can only do some cars, because he needs a special computer to diagnose the engine fault of the more modern ones. You know all those ones with fiddled emission figures that have software installed inside the engine management system!

The Proof of the Pudding Right Here

Now here at James Pirie we don’t do Planned Obsolescence, we don’t use tamper proof screws and we don’t suggest that you change what you’ve bought every six months. What we do actually do is to sell you stuff that may well last a lifetime, from some of the best brands in the world at some pretty darn interesting prices. There I’ve got it off my chest.

No link today, just have a browse of the website and see if I am wrong.