My inkjet printer broke recently. It originally cost $100 about 5 years ago. My choices were: buy a new printer for $75, or buy a new printhead for $50. This is a very typical scenario these days. In fact, maybe it's not, when I think of my car stereo. When that broke, it would cost $100 to buy a new one, and more than $100 to get it repaired. So I bought a new one. But when the printer broke, I bought the new printhead instead. The printer was still perfectly good, it just needed a new printhead. Why send the printer to a landfill? Maybe I'm just a more responsible citizen now. I hate to see all the stuff people put by the curb to send to the landfill.
Suppose you could pay $200 for a DVD player guaranteed to work for 4 years. Or you could pay $100 for a DVD player that would last 2 years. What would you do? Most people would pay $100, with the justification that "Hey, I can get another brand new one in 2 years!" But there is a hidden cost, in the landfills, god knows what's leaking out of the electronics in the landfills into our environment, and the lost jobs.
I think that manufacturing quality parts and opening automobile repair centers that are reasonably priced could save the American auto industry. Instead of making cars as cheaply as possible, they could make them as reliable as possible, then make money when you buy parts to repair them. It's only a matter of time before the American auto manufacturers are sold off to the Japanese, Germans, or who knows. I think the unions are partially to blame because they insist on a certain wage, and when they get it (or near it), thousands of people get laid off. The unions are squeezing their own people out of jobs. Then who profits? The people who run the unions.
Sure, many people want to buy a new car every few years, or they want to buy more expensive cars. But these aren't the people who can save the American auto industry. I'm talking about the lower and middle classes. They are the ones who want to buy American cars. They are the people who will spend $500 to repair their car every year, rather than get fed up and buy a new one. They don't have a choice. But they aren't stupid, and they're probably buying a lot more cheap foreign cars these days.
I just ran across the article Wal-Mart You Don't Know today and I feel vindicated. It says that not only does Wal-Mart want to sell the cheapest stuff, but they want to buy the products for less money every year, squeezing their suppliers for profits. This is causing the suppliers to outsource the labor, and is taking away American jobs.
This paragraph sums it up best:
It's Wal-Mart in the role of Adam Smith's invisible hand. And the Milwaukee employees of Master Lock who shopped at Wal-Mart to save money helped that hand shove their own jobs right to Nogales. Not consciously, not directly, but inevitably. "Do we as consumers appreciate what we're doing?" Larrimore asks. "I don't think so. But even if we do, I think we say, Here's a Master Lock for $9, here's another lock for $6--let the other guy pay $9."
If we keep outsourcing our jobs, who will have any money to buy all this stuff? The problem is that everyone only looks out for themselves, and few look at the big picture.
Here are some reactions to the article:
- Liberals: goddamn greedy corporate bastards
- Rich suburbanites: Wow, $2.97 for a gallon of pickles? I'm driving my Hummer to the nearest Wal-mart right now!
- Republicans: Awesome, every time they sell some pickles, my Wal-Mart stock goes up .00000001 cents
- Young people: OMG, NBD WCA ZZZZZ
- Libertarians: It's a free country
- George Bush: Terrorists hate our cheap pickles.
- Democrats: goddamn George Bush
- Everyone else: And this has what to do with me?
2 comments:
This is a big issue in terms of sustainability, too. My advisor, Eli Blevis, presented a landmark paper on sustainable design at CHI last April. In addition to a great synthesis of existing literature in other disciplines that is relevant to interface design, Eli offered a framework for considerations designers should include in their process.
This is a big problem in a world where it is easier and in fact part of the business model to have people throw away broken or out-of-fashion iPods in favor of the newest model. Consumerism is led by marketing, which is tied to design. If designers can innovate with a sustainable eye, maybe marketers can find business value in reuse and quality.
This all makes me feel a little more satisfied that I used my first cell phone (a prepaid Tracfone from 1999) until my cell phone company forced me to switch to a GSM phone (that they gave me for free).
Come to think of it, I've been hanging onto a lot of stuff into or past its "intended" useful life. Until a few years ago, I was using the laptop I had in college (a Dell from mid-1990s that ran on Windows 95 and--wait for it--had only 16 MB RAM, until I swapped out 8MB of it for an additional 32 MB. I didn't replace my TV until the old one wouldn't come on and it was 30 yrs old with an analog signal. My original EZ Pass transponder just got upgraded. We still have the telephone I used in college. And just now I'm wrestling with my ink jet printer from college--when we got a new computer, I didn't have room in the house for a laser printer.
Post a Comment