I CALLED my wife the other day and said, ‘Look at this, my diary says that the brushcutter’s guarantee expires today – bet it doesn’t work when the gardener comes tomorrow!’ It didn’t.
It was a well-known make from that well-known country, purveyor of everything from baked beans to cars. Of course the brushcutter had first broken down within in a month of buying it, so the final betrayal was not really a surprise.
It makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it? The term ‘planned obsolescence’ has been around since at least the 1960s, and yet nothing has changed. Just for the record, within three weeks of the already-doomed brushcutter failing, our mobile extension telephone packed up, so did our DVD/CD, and our fax/copier/answering machine said ‘Enough!’ I won’t even start on our television set and video player/recorder giving up the ghost a couple of months ago.
And don’t think that replacing any of these items is a simple exercise, far from it. Technology ‘advances’ (inverted comments because I have serious doubts that all advances are actually going forward), and a simple piece of equipment of a few years ago is today a multi-tasking nightmare (think of your cellphone).
But what does planned obsolescence mean? Very basically, the manufacturer of an item does not design it to last a lifetime, but rather to last as short a time as possible so that it has to be replaced – in other words, another one bought.
You know the expression, “They don’t make things the way they used to…” indeed they don’t. Our first new fridge is now 38 years old and is rusty, leaky and iced up, but it’s still in the garage doing its job. Our second-but-last new fridge lasted just eight years.
Never mind the cost of replacement, think of the cost to the environment. Think of the all the materials that go into these goods that must be replaced on a regular basis: the minerals and metals, the rubber and the plastics (crude oil), the fabrics, the wood (such as chipboard in cabinets). Think of the actual production, of the water and the electricity that is used unnecessarily in remaking something that should have been made properly the first time.
I could go on, but let’s end on a brighter note. I was sitting quietly at my desk the other day when a monkey ran past. So what, you may well ask, but this monkey was running OUT of my study and it was clutching a pineapple under its arm.
Think about this for a moment, a pineapple is not the sort of thing one would want to clutch under one’s bare arm, but this monkey was giving it a go. He leapt off the deck into a tree, took a seat, and then a bite – I was up and yelling by now, but the thief was out of reach. Eventually the prickly pineapple became too much and he dropped it and we retrieved it, slightly chewed, from the front garden.
I suppose even pineapples are subject to planned obsolescence in the monkey’s world. Cheers!
