Olde Good Things; Antiquities, and also our "Age of Disposables" and "Planned Obsolescence"

I had always had the idea that "antique collecting" was really more of a 20th century invention than anything else. It seemed to me from references in books by Dickens, etc., that before that perhaps old items were valued for their usefulness and solidity-- such as a "fine old oaken chest," but that general, people looked at old stuff as pretty much just old stuff, and were as fickle about fashion as anyone could be.

American President's wives starting with Lincoln's (or maybe before that), I had the feeling, had little use for the past, and only valued things that were new and in fashion. Let me look into this for a second--

Well, what I find mostly is the idea that 1) poor people historically held on to objects as long as they could because a) they had too and b) most items were made to  last longer.

The whole idea of "planned obsolescence," in fact, more or less came in with things like cars in the 1950's in terms of mass produced items...

Stingy Hoarders and Savers

But before that, hanging on to old "stuff" could be seen as a sign of "cheapness" too-- famously, the radio comedian Jack Benny had some kind of old car  ( a Maxwell?) which was running impossibly past its time mostly because of the efforts of Rochester, Benny's chauffeur...

And some societies, as in certain parts of Italy, threw old crockery out the window at New Year's, which was thought to be a way of bringing good luck...

Of course, their were always "family heirlooms." Most people with any taste usually appreciated something that was truly well made and had a link to their family history...

Just a personal note here: we used to own a heavy aluminum ice cream scoop back from the late 1940's which we noticed was no longer available by about 1955...instead they were selling these cheap things made in Japan for the general public which could actually break or get bent on very hard  ice cream.

I liked ice cream a lot and made sure we held on to that old scoop. Since I eat almost no ice cream now, though, I would only have it as a "collector's item" and a kind of heirloom...

Good Tools

Likewise, I have an older cousin who was a natural handyman type and who, although only being a high school graduate, eventually became the Head of the entire maintenance department for a big Midwestern supermarket chain.

He valued useful old objects, of course, just as all workmen want " a set of good tools,"--I will never forget how angry he was at his wife for throwing out " my good hose," which was some heavy rubber item which he valued the same way I valued the old ice cream scoop. ( he pointed out that the new household and garden hoses being made..in fact, I remember this happening in the early 1950's-- were suddenly all sort of "cheap plastic"  and "Made in Japan," --when being made in Japan was not the plus it later came to be ( only the cheapest gimcrack stuff came from Japan in the 1950's).

Going online, I find that one author of a site called About Stuff or something like that writes, however:


The Age of Obsolescence and Abundance
One lucrative marketing and manufacturing concept, Planned Obsolescence, changed everything after WWII, when products began being specifically designed with disposability and limited life span or functionality in mind. You would be hard pressed to get anyone to admit this was what they were doing, but I believe this is key to where we are today. Shorter life span in your home means more frequent shopping sprees to the store. What could be wrong with that? In fact, to most, at the time it truly meant progress. Susan Strasser, in her book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Macmillan, 1999), refers to this idea being used as early as the 1920s when a Ford Motor Company advertisement implied that a change in style meant progress in capitalism. Growth in America was being driven by a new sense of convenience and disposability. Paper plates and cups, frozen foods, TV dinners, foil and plastic pouches, aerosol cans, and squeezable tubes were the way of the future, bringing a new convenience and ease to everyone's lifestyle—especially the housewife's. Packaging became the new billboard for marketers inside the supermarket. "Miracles in Packaging and Processing are Radically Simplifying U.S. Cooking" is a headline Strasser cites from a 1959 LOOK magazine article. Why spend time cleaning pots and pans and dishes when you can toss it all away in the garbage when you're done? Easily disposable items offered a new freedom that was quickly linked to the notion of abundance.
From then on, changes in styles and new technologies gave way to new and improved products that were increasingly affordable to more people. "Out with the old and in with the new" became ubiquitous. Once it was put onto the curb as garbage, we no longer had to think about it. It was out of sight and out of mind. Abundance and waste soon became synonymous with the American way of life. More choices, more conveniences, and with the invention of credit cards more accessible money made Americans very conspicuous consumers. With only 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. consumes a whopping 30 percent of the planet's resources and churns out 30 percent of its wastes.

 Cheap paper plates: from internet post

titled "ten worst items ever made"

----
The Cautionary Tale of the Very Durable Pressure Cooker:

It seems to me the author of the above is also very ecologically minded and of course would prefer a return to things made to last.

However, several times in school I heard the old "pressure cooker" or "market saturation" story from teachers talking about business and economics.

The way this classic story goes, when pressure cookers were first introduced, there was a lot of concern about their safety and they were, in fact, built to last.

But they lasted all too well. Since they did not wear out, people handed them down from one generation to the next and after a while, the U.S, market was "saturated" with sturdy pressure cookers. 

The result: sales of new pressure cookers kept falling and falling and it looked like the pressure cooker companies would go out of business..because they made something that was just made too well.

Disposable lighters, pens, etc. 

Something somewhat different happened with the Age of Plastic coming to America and the world and the idea of "disposable" products, like razors and pens made for limited use.

The most successful maker of disposable products was the Bic corporation. I heard Baron Bruno Bich talk about how his family's company had achieved success at one business meeting: instead of trying to create a product that was just a cheaper version of an expensive pen for instance, their ball point pen would be designed to fulfull the one goal focus groups said they cared about the most with ball point pens.

This turned out to be "ease of writing,"-- and if you remember, people DID really appreciate how smoothly Bic pens wrote compared to other kinds and also of course the old fashioned refillable pens with their inkwells etc. Oh yes, you particularly noticed the ease of writing if you ever wrote on some of that yellow sort of absorbent paper that was available way back when...

It didn't matter to people that the Bic pens could occasionally make smudgy marks--or have other failings-- they fulfilled the one main desirable function most people wanted...that ease of writing. (Something DID have to be done, of course, about pens that might leak...I can remember seeing the look of outrage and anguish of men whose ballpoint pens had leaked and hopeless stained their white shirts --where they had pens in their shirt pockets...or even the pocket occasionally of a light colored suit jacket!...)

The Sea of Plastic Junk...The Vast Underwater Mess

There is one problem with all this disposable plastic "stuff", however, in that being "non-biodegradable " huge pools of non-decaying plastic now float in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans ( experts have spoken about  this on late night talk shows, many times).

But that will be a separate article...