Perhaps it does not require much focus. When comparing current products with old products, we will find that the old products were of higher quality due to their longer life.
Even Generation Z must have heard from their parents that the quality of products and industries in the past was much better than those of today.
The logical question that arises is why do companies manufacture lower quality products when they are capable of manufacturing products of better quality and that last much longer?
- Centennial Light Bulb:
It is the story of a light in the state of California that has been lit since 1901 until today. In fact, in 2001, a large number of people there made a birthday party for the light and a cake with the words “100” written on it. We may find the subject ridiculous, but the gist of the matter is that we are talking about a light that has been working for a very long time, unlike the lights that we buy, which have a specific lifespan of up to 25,000 hours.
This means that we as humans have been better at industry.
- The Phoebus Cartel:
Date: December 24, 1924 Location: Geneva, Switzerland The first unique secret conference was held, bringing together the largest lamp manufacturers, including Osram, Philips, and most of the major global lamp manufacturers.
The Phoebus is the ancient Greek god of light and a cartel is a meeting of manufacturers of a product to control that product.
This meeting was held after they noticed a significant decrease in sales, and to avoid this, it was agreed to reduce the quality of the manufactured lamps by making the number of working hours less, not exceeding 1000 hours at that time, although the matter was very costly for those companies, as they spent huge sums of money to make the number of working hours of those lamps less.
And thus, after the cartel was implemented and the procedures that were adopted were implemented, and all parties, which are the lamp manufacturing companies, signed the cartel’s terms, which were not to manufacture any light that exceeded 1,000 hours of operation at that time, and that was in the year 1940, lamp sales increased tremendously.
After that, patents began to appear in the field of lamp manufacturing, such as the adoption of E27 as a global standard for connecting lamps and a patent for a lamp that works for 100,000 hours, but the lamp has not been implemented and no company has manufactured it yet.
- Planned obsolescence:
Many people may think that the principle of manufacturing products such as lamps and other products is an absolutely evil principle, but history has proven otherwise. After the Great Depression that began in 1929 after the Industrial Revolution, a man who is considered the spiritual father of Planned obsolescence, he is Bernard London who adopted in 1932 a theory that was considered crazy at the time, which was based on determining a shelf life for any product, thus ensuring the continuation of the wheel of production and eliminating the unemployment that occurred and led to the Great Depression.
Although Bernard's theory was more strict and dictatorial, as it depended on governments imposing a shelf life on the product, and after a few years the buyer must hand over this product to the government to destroy it, even if the product was working well, or pay a very high tax on the product if he wanted to keep it, thus ensuring the continuation of production and thus eliminating unemployment and not repeating the tragedy of the Great Depression.
- The limited functional life design:
It is an advanced principle of Bernard London's theory based on setting a shelf life for the product after which the principle becomes unusable.
Where the factory focuses on the consumer's mentality in changing the product voluntarily, for example, the competition in the forties between the two giants of the American automobile industry, Ford and GM, at that time, Ford was making the Model T, which was a very practical black-painted car, while GM focused at the time on finding paint in different colours that would stick to cars, so GM cars appeared in different colours with a new colour for the new year's model, unlike Ford, which announced that changing the black colour of the car meant that the car was out of warranty, so the idea of society classes in the field of cars began at that time, as people appeared driving coloured GM cars and different designs began to appear, meaning that they were able to buy new cars, the latest model, unlike people who own practical cars, but somewhat old.
Although we are not forced to change many products in our lives, we have become accustomed to changing many of our things because of the social view of others. For example, changing the mobile phone, even though it works well, just because the latest version has become available in the markets, is our problem, in addition to some positives that have emerged from the theory, as it has been able to create new job opportunities in addition to the development that has occurred. Therefore, we work to buy new electrical appliances because they are better or because the ones we own have become old, the same applies to cars, for example, and so on.