How Do We Fix the Collapse of Quality?

by
Charles Hugh Smith
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There's a great uplifting hope swirling around the potential to fix what's broken, and so here's my question: how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability that we now take for granted? What do I mean by the collapse of quality and durability? Here are a few examples of many.

1. Appliances that were once built to last 70 years now fail in 7 years (or less). A reader recently shared the story of a GE chest freezer his parents bought 70 years ago--not a fancy freezer, or a top of the line unit, just the standard model everyone bought. That freezer is still running great, 70 years later.

Compare that to the anecdotal accounts we hear all the time of costly new refrigerators failing after a few years. The repairperson is called in, they check it out, and inform the owner it's not worth repairing. So the three-year old fridge is hauled off to the landfill.

Let's say the fridge lasts a grand total of 7 years. That's a 90% decline of durability. Under what sort of bewitchment do we declare this something other than a complete collapse of quality and durability? Think about it: we now have to buy 10 appliances over three generations, where we once could buy one appliance that would last three generations.

2. Off-the-shelf shoes from Costco that now literally fall apart long before they wear out. For the past 30 years, I've bought whatever shoes Costco is stocking as work shoes--for yard work, light construction repairs, etc. Now the Costco shoes literally fall apart before I can even put much wear on them. Please examine the following photos.

First, the soles detached from the toe of the shoes. I re-attached the soles with epoxy glue.

Then the rest of the soles detached.

Note the paucity of adhesive. The manufacturer scrimped on perhaps 25 cents of adhesive and 75 cents of extra labor (if that--how much time does it take to apply more adhesive?), in effect guaranteeing obsolescence / failure. Meanwhile, Costco profits are soaring.

How much would it have cost Costco to demand some actual quality control and pay an extra dollar for a product that wasn't designed and manufactured to fail? Would I have paid an extra dollar for a product that was assembled to last long enough to wear out? Yes. After all, what's the difference between $29 and $30? Not enough to matter, but the difference in quality does matter.

I often mention shadow work, the work we consumers have to do to keep the crapified products and services Corporate America sells us functioning. So Costco profits from selling products designed to fail because I'm supposed to throw these rubbish shoes in the landfill and dutifully go to Costco to buy a replacement pair of planned obsolescence.

But being irksomely frugal, I did the job that Costco's manufacturer was supposed to do, which was apply sufficient adhesive so the sole of the shoe would actually stay attached to the rest of the shoe. In other words, I had to perform this shadow work at my own expense, enabling Costco's profits to swell because I did their work for them.

Like the slowly boiled frog, we've habituated to the collapse of quality and durability, as the cartels and monopolies only sell a dizzying array of planned obsolescence.

3. The app is crap. It takes an endless amount of shadow work to keep all the digital devices and systems we now depend on running, as the devices and software are KPO kludgy planned obsolescence. I laid all this out in recent posts: Is Anyone Else's Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital "Shadow Work" as Mine Is? (5/22/24)

Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work (2/14/24)

If AI Is So Great, Why Is Managing the Digital Realm Eating Us Alive? (3/1/24)

4. The extended warranty admission of the collapse of quality and durability. A friend recounted a telling experience when he and his wife bought a new car, the Japanese brand always listed first in quality and durability. My friend passed on the costly extended warranty and the salesperson guffawed. "So you want to roll the dice?" In other words, buying the highest rated vehicles is now a gamble that nothing breaks down after a year, and so you better pay extra for an extended warranty as you'll probably roll snake-eyes and be handed a repair bill for thousands of dollars.

Every product now has an extended warranty admission of the collapse of quality and durability, a profitable admission that look, we both know this product/service is designed to fail, so pay us more now or pay us more later, but this extended warranty is cheaper than the outrageous repair bill or replacement cost.

How is this not another example of Addiction Capitalism, in which the consumer has a monkey on their back? We can either get the nickel bag of smack (extended warranty) or the dime bag (Limited Edition, Premium, Elite, paying more for the quality that was once standard).

Move Over, Disaster Capitalism--Make Room for Addiction Capitalism (7/1/24)

So how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability? I'm all ears.

The Slow Death of the Single Family Home (30:57 min).

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