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The theory of planned obsolescence and me
(by Ed Flynn - August 06, 2008)
We bought a new refrigerator last week. We didn’t really want to. Our old one wasn’t really that old, less than five years, but apparently, just as they don’t write songs or make movies like they used to, they don’t produce appliances that last as long either. Twice within the last six months my wife had gone to the kitchen to find that it had stopped running and there was a flood from melting ice cubes and defrosted food spreading across the floor.
Maybe it could have been fixed again but the serviceman didn’t seem to know what was really causing the problem. Replacing a part may have gotten it humming again but frankly we had lost confidence in it. At our age there’s enough to worry about without worrying about a refrigerator. So, as I said, we bought a new one, this time with an extended five-year warranty. I hope we both last that long.
What was particularly disappointing about the experience was that the refrigerator was a Frigidaire, a brand name that, until this happened, I recalled with only the fondest memories. Our family’s first refrigerator, you see, was a Frigidaire. My dad had somehow managed to buy it in the early 1930s during the Great Depression and it was one of the first ones in the neighborhood. It replaced the ice box that I can still remember standing in our kitchen in those days when the ice man came up Bradley Avenue in Bergenfield with his horse drawn wagon bringing cakes of ice to every house and chipping off pieces on a hot summer day and handing them to us kids to suck on as if they were popsicles. Back then Frigidaire was just about the only brand on the market and, as a result, once they got over using the term “ice box,” most people referred to all refrigerators as a “frig.”
That original Frigidaire was still running in my parents’ kitchen when I left for service in World War II. I’m not sure how many refrigerators my wife and I have owned since I returned and we set up housekeeping for ourselves. Not many. Appliances used to last a lot longer than five years.
In fact, most household appliances lasted so long in the post World War II era that manufacturers were accused of indulging in a practice termed “planned obsolescence” by parceling out new features one at a time in order to make your refrigerator or washing machine or other appliance periodically seem out-of date.
For example, that first refrigerator in my parents home wasn’t much more than an electrified ice box with a motor on the top to replace the cake of ice at the bottom. Frozen food compartments weren’t introduced in home units until after World War II and the one in our own first refrigerator was little more than a small box in the upper corner. It was big enough for a few pounds of meat and some packages of frozen food and it had a metal ice cube tray that you had to ply out with a knife and then take to the sink where you had to run hot water over it until the cubes would drop out. Later models had a rubber insert in the tray to make it easier to remove the cubes and eventually they introduced trays with an automatic handle to loosen the cubes.
In the 1950s when we moved from an apartment into our first home we bought a refrigerator with a large pullout frozen food compartment at the bottom. However, that was before refrigerators defrosted themselves and every few months you had to turn it off, remove all the frozen food, place it in a laundry basket and then chip the ice from inside the compartment. Once the compartment was ice free and the packages in the laundry basket had defrosted, you could return them to the compartment and turn the refrigerator back on. Automatic defrosting became available in the 1960s so we eventually replaced that “obsolete” refrigerator with a more modern model even though the old one was still working fine.
Five years ago, when we relocated from a house that had become too large for us into a smaller one, I figured the new refrigerator we purchased, along with all of the other brand new appliances, would certainly be our last one. After all, it was the latest model with all the bells and whistles; an automatic filtered ice water spigot, ice cube and crushed ice dispenser, adjustable shelves, even a special shelf for cans.
Planned obsolescence? There was no way the manufacturer was going to come up with new features to make this one obsolete, at least in my lifetime. But apparently they came up with a new form of built-in obsolescence; using parts that wear out. Sort of like what is happening in my own body.
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