this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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I think this is due less to planned obsolescence than people want to believe. I'd argue it's as much due to market pressure. People want to buy cheap things so companies start making things cheaper.
You're mostly right, but I think you have cause and effect backwards.
The real problem is advertisers training everyone to seek instant gratification and treat everything as disposable. People have been brainwashed to want things cheap, and to want them right now.
You can still get appliances that will last decades, but they're more expensive. Back in the "good ol' days", home appliances were a major purchase that you usually budgeted and saved for. If it broke, you hired someone to repair it. When you bought a toaster, the price was the equivalent of $100 to $300 adjusted for inflation.
Not to mention that there's heavy survivorship bias on the topic. There were garbage quality appliances made back then that didn't survive.
I think not.
I remember the last time I went to the store to get a toaster.
They were all in the same price range and all about the same quality. There was no option for an expensive toaster that would last fifty years.
You were shopping at a store with cheap products then.
So name it.
What is this store that sells high durability consumer products?
An appliance store...
You're going to have to give a detailed explanation of your process here.
What store did you imagine I went to?
Walmart.
In store try Williams Sonoma for higher quality.
This literally the first time in my life that I, an American, has heard someone call 'William Sonoma' a quality brand.
And you could look for an appliance that is supposed to be quality, and costs even more than other "quality" brands. Then that thing you paid that much for lasts even shorter than the cheap appliance. And then when you take it to get repaired, because it cost so much of course it can be fixed, they tell you the entire [main active unit] needs replaced because the mfg doesn't provide the [small bit of active unit that's actually bad] which happens to cost only twice what the cheap appliance in whole costs.
Salaries are so low it’s a race to the bottom for every product. Anyone can design a toaster that works, but it takes an enshittification engineer to make one that barely works.
Salaries are low, but this is a trend that's been going on for decades. Since long before the current affordability crisis.
Wealth inequality has also been a long slow march. The fact is almost nobody can afford a basic standard of living from minimum wage in the 70’s: American-made cotton clothing, appliances that last 30 years, real local food that doesn’t make us sick, on and on… It’s not even that the products are cheaper it’s that they’ve also become less ethical. If you shop for a regular organic cotton USA-made T-shirt it’s like $80. What was once within reach is now a luxury with a cheap surrogate.
Thankful for someone else using the tshirts. I tell people this and they get so mad. $80? They say. I’m like… yea think of how much goes into that shirt! How much would it cost if you made it? If you want good quality that lasts even a tshirt will cost you $100. Our dollar is near worthless.
Agree. People buy shit for close to nothing and are then shocked that it's worth nothing.
Naww... it's about the infinite growth. "Shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, and enshittification" all describe aspects of it.
There are very few (you can probably count them on your hands) companies that don't do it, such as Arizona tea. The worst offenders are publicly traded companies because they need to show that "infinite growth" to investors.
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
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.
I think it's both. Otherwise trash shipping companies like TEMU wouldn't have become so incredibly popular. A lot of people are basically NPCs which like to mindlessly consume stuff. The cheaper the better.
Because they were conditioned to be that way.
It’s true. My own husband looks at cheap garbage and thinks it’s “nice”. I’m just like, you can tell you were raised on cheap Walmart furniture. I was poor but we thrifted real wood. I wasn’t allowed to buy cheap clothes (only made to buy less of them) because they didn’t want my clothes to look like shit after a wash.
Don’t buy your kids crap clothing crap food or have them sleep in a room of crap. Buy them high quality just buy them less.
In case of real, immediate need, buy what you can afford. My parents love that awful store and I have a deep loathing of it, but in a pinch, I surely will. But people should know Walmart name brands are of lesser quality, because Walmart negotiates very low wholesale prices, and don't really pass along the savings, anymore.
Shopping is a hell of a drug
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Makers
Yea well, they are trying to hide how badly our money has deflated. Can’t buy cotton clothing only plastic. Can’t buy real chicken only chicken that went through a chemical wash.
In fact you can buy both cotton clothing and air-chilled chicken. Those are two things I focus on buying. And not because the chlorine level in water-cooled chicken is dangerous, it's because the water retention prevents better browning.