Your toaster dies the second you unbox it. Pants rip on day one. The quality of everything is trash now. This is what bigheaded people call enshittification. Companies deliberately design products to break right after the warranty. This is due to the so-called “Hunt for Infinite growth.” Steady profits ain’t enough. They need MORE, so they skimp, shrink packages, and shove everything behind subscriptions. Infinite growth is a plague, and it hurts your personal finance.
Disclaimer: This video is satirical commentary and for entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.
A lot of the “planned obsolescence” perspective is tainted by survivorship bias. The whole “they don’t make things like they used to,” bit is ignoring the fact that garbage quality appliances existed back in the day too.
You can still buy high quality appliances, but not many people want to drop over $200 on a toaster (the adjusted price in 1950). And not many people want to get appliances repaired when they can just get another garbage product for $20.
I highly doubt most appliance manufacturers are intentionally designing their products to fail at a certain point. It’s more likely that the engineers are given a profit margin goal and have to use parts with a lower MTBF to fit within it.
But companies are responsible for training people to think that way.
Life is more expensive for poor people. What you say might be true, but can most people actually afford the $200 toaster? Maybe they can in the most literal sense, there’s $400 in their account, but they can’t justify the expense.
Good ol Sam Vimes put it fairly well in the book Men at Arms:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
-Men at Arms
They can afford it. That’s the thing. If you quit buying garbage from Walmart and save. I get what this sounds like but I see the CARTS of garbage being bought by poor people in Walmart. Some people are trained to squirrel away anything with a clearance label. Mounds of clothing that will all look like shit and fit like shit after a wash (to be never worn again).
That’s the thing, though. People in the good old days often couldn’t afford expensive appliances right away either. They budgeted and saved until they could, or relied on it being given as a gift (small appliances were a common wedding present)
But the brainwashing for rampant consumerism has largely made that a thing of the past. People won’t just toast their bread on a skillet for a few months until they can afford a quality toaster.
The cost of living for basic stuff has far surpassed the wage growth though, so this isn’t just a budgeting problem (though there is some of that).
And I hate how individuals are blamed for their poor choices when the corpos are spending billions to try and distillate how to make people spend their hard earned money on them.
Our society is anti-humans and individuals are blamed because they succumb to the harsh pressure put on them everyday.
Yes there are shitty people that are outright dumb, but the number of people barely scraping by is rising and they are blamed personally for a system designed to crush them.
Paying $5 for a new tshirt in America does make you at least responsible, though. Think of how many resources goes into that. Someone has to cut and sew that shit. It’s slave labor to receive a product that’s garbage and won’t fit after a wash. If you’re doing things like this you shouldn’t wonder why your own labor is worth so little.
Increasingly more people can’t pay for basics like rent and food, is it far fetched that they won’t pay 25-30$ for a t-shirt when they are indebting themselves more each month?
If you can afford ethically sourced clothes and you buy crap on Amazon, you are definitely a problem.
But if you just scrape by, you shouldn’t be blamed for buying a 5$ t-shirt.
Thrifting is a great way to ethically buy clothes. You can often find brand new $50+ shirts with tags for ~$5. I have a full closet of higher end apparel that cost me < $200.
Although it is a time investment, which is another thing poor people are often short on.