THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  If you’ve visited friends in Europe, I’m sure you’ve noticed that they have smaller homes, refrigerators, and cars. They use mass transit far more than we do. They have those well-designed folding racks that hang over doors and radiators to air-dry their clothes. They have fewer, smaller TVs that air fewer commercials. Their food is fresher, more local, less packaged, often bought from a shopkeeper with whom they share a conversation, both because they know him and because they aren’t in such a darn rush. Paying for a university education and health care is not a major source of stress, as it is in the United States. Most European countries have a smaller environmental footprint and a higher quality of life, too.

  Are they sad to live in smaller quarters, drive smaller cars, and be surrounded by less Stuff? According to all the data on national happiness, clearly not. With a less consumption-focused society, accumulating more, bigger, newer Stuff isn’t the be-all and end-all. For example, instead of watching hours of TV alone in their big houses among all their possessions, in Europe people spend more time hanging out in public places and socializing with friends and neighbors.49 When I visited Turkey last year for a meeting and a screening of The Story of Stuff, I spent many hours sitting in sidewalk cafés with my new Turkish friends. We had long, spirited, and often loud conversations, filling a whole row of tables, with people coming and going, dropping in to join us. I commented on how unfortunate it is that we don’t have a café culture in the United States, where we can linger and discuss politics and art and love and plans to make the world a better place. My Turkish friends were surprised and wanted to know why we don’t. I realized that it’s because in the United States, we’re too busy, too stressed to sit around and just converse. Maybe as college students we hung out and talked in cafés, but we seldom do as adults. And in those rare instances when we do meet friends at a café, we increasingly have to talk really quietly or all the people plugged into laptops will glare at us.

  Source: R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2006).

  Indeed, Americans now work harder than the citizens of nearly any other industrialized country.50 We’re caught in what I call the work-watch-spend treadmill: exhausting ourselves at work, then decompressing in front of the TV, which blares commercials telling us we need to go shopping, which we do, only to find we need to work even harder to pay for it all, and so the cycle continues. And what do we have to show for it? Monster houses, bigger cars, and a growing lack of physical, mental, and environmental health (not to mention a ton of trash and CO2).

  As a result, nearly everyone reports an increasing sense of anxiety. I was recently at a public lecture on food issues. One of the speakers was Mollie Katzen, author of our college kitchen bible, the Moosewood Cookbook. She explained that she’s been writing recipes and sharing cooking advice for more than twenty five years, and she has witnessed a huge change in our relationship to food preparation. Years ago, she said, she received fascinating questions about what to do with particular spices or unusual vegetables. Nowadays, she said, the most frequent request she gets is for quick and easy meals that require few ingredients and take as little time as possible. That’s what we get—stress and fast food—in return for working like dogs?

  A growing movement of people in the United States and internationally have chosen to opt out of the relentless treadmill. This approach—known variously as downshifting, enough-ism, or voluntary simplicity—involves embracing a shift toward working and spending less. Sometimes it happens voluntarily, other times after someone loses a job but decides to make it the start of a new relationship to work. Downshifters choose to prioritize leisure, community building, self-development, and health over accumulating more Stuff. Some make slight adjustments such as buying used clothes, growing some of their own food, and biking instead of driving to work. Others take greater steps, such as adjusting spending patterns to live well on far less money so they can work part-time. Some share housing, cars, and other big-ticket items with other people. The focus is not on doing without, but on enhancing nonmaterial aspects of their lives, which they believe—and evidence supports—are greater sources of happiness and security anyway. As Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity, explains, “The objective is not dogmatically to live with less, but it is a more demanding intention of living with balance in order to find a life of greater purpose, fulfillment and satisfaction.”51

  Downshifters are sometimes criticized for lacking awareness about the role of privilege in their big life change: they tend to have more education (often at the graduate level), connections, and confidence in their ability to navigate the system, all of which sets them apart from the poor, who involuntarily live with less. After “escaping” the system, many downshifters fail to engage politically. I would argue, as Professor Michael Maniates does in Confronting Consumption, that a portion of the hours downshifters win from working fewer hours should be dedicated to the “collective struggle aimed at transforming institutions that drive consumerism and overconsumption.”52 Some of the policy battles to be fought in the name of creating a wholly downshifted society (and thus, one that has a smaller environmental footprint and, as important, is happier) include benefits for parttime work, limits on extremely high compensation of corporate leaders (with the money saved going to increases in low-end wages), a shorter work week, and reinvestment in the social commons: parks, libraries, public transportation, and other public facilities that can provide people access to things they need without having to buy each and every one.

  Regardless of the critique, downshifters help prove that there’s a functional, enjoyable alternative to a fifty-hour-plus workweek, second and third jobs, etc. Overworking didn’t emerge inevitably from the genetic makeup or innate desire of Americans. Instead, the overwork-overspend model was the result of conscious decisions made by our government, business, and even some labor leaders. The good news, as downshifters illustrate on an individual level, is that these decisions can be unmade as well.

  Forging a Consumer Class

  So once the system to make more Stuff was set in place, the dilemma then became how to sell enough of that Stuff to keep the machine running. When this humongous increase in the capacity to produce consumer goods first occurred, most people had neither the expendable income nor the desire to orient their lives around accumulating ever more Stuff.

  Henry Ford, best known for his perfection and standardization of the assembly line, came up with an answer. He knew that his company’s success depended not only on continuing to produce reliable products as quickly and cheaply as possible, but also in helping to create a consumer class, made up of the broader public, that could actually buy the cars. Ford’s theories of mass production have been so influential that they are widely referred to as Fordism, but what many people don’t realize is that the assembly line piece of it is only half of the story. As much as it involved increasing mass production, Fordism was equally concerned with facilitating mass consumption because, as Ford realized, producers can’t keep churning out all this Stuff unless someone is going to buy it.

  In 1914, Ford took the unprecedented step of voluntarily doubling his workers’ salaries to five dollars a day (equivalent to just over one hundred dollars a day in 2008 dollars). He also decreased the workday from nine to eight hours. His reward: lower worker turnover, the ability to run three shifts a day instead of two, and greater car sales as the workers themselves joined his customer base. Other companies watching this process soon followed Ford’s lead, and the foundation for mass consumerism was set.53

  With Fordism set into motion, people had the means to buy Stuff, but not yet the inclination. Shortly after the end of World War II, retailing analyst Victor Lebow described what was needed to keep the people consuming and factories producing: “Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption... we need things consumed, bur
ned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”54

  In order to achieve this vision, industry executives and their minions developed an array of strategies:

  transitioning from local stores to ubiquitous shopping malls to the big-boxes and Internet retailers of today, which I described in chapter 3 on distribution;

  making it possible for customers to buy now and pay later (plus interest) with the invention and heavy promotion of credit and credit cards;

  systematizing and normalizing the concepts of planned and perceived obsolescence (which I describe below);

  removing self-reliant and/or community-based ways to fulfill basic needs, as for example with the deliberate destruction of light rail systems by the major car manufacturers;

  the intentional merging of identity and status with consumption (i.e., that you are what you buy);

  and the crown jewel, advertising.

  There are whole books written about each of these tools, so I’m going to review just the two most insidious of them here.

  Two Tricks of the Trade

  1. Planned Obsolescence

  As the production of Stuff ratcheted up, one of the first messages broadcast to consumers was that it was better to have more than one of most things. A second (and then third, fourth, and fifth) bathing suit, when the previous norm for most women had been to make do just fine with one. A second car. And finally a second home, with a whole other set of contents to fill it up, so ultimately you had at least two of everything.

  But even so, producers of Stuff realized that there was an eventual limit to how much people could consume. At some point, everyone would have enough shoes and toasters and cars. At some point, there would be total saturation. And if the factories were going to keep churning out Stuff once consumers were Stuff saturated, then there’d be a glut. And a glut would be very bad for business indeed.

  So the architects of the system came up with a strategy to keep consumers buying: planned obsolescence. Another name for planned obsolescence is “designed for the dump.” Brooks Stevens, an American industrial designer who is widely credited with popularizing the term in the 1950s, defined it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”55

  In planned obsolescence, products are intended to be thrown away as quickly as possible and then replaced. (That’s called “shortening the replacement cycle.”) Now, this is different from true technological obsolescence, in which some actual advance in technology renders the previous version obsolete—like telephones replacing the telegraph. The instances when new technology honestly surpasses the old are rarer than we’re led to believe. Today’s cell phones, for example, which have an average life span of only about a year, are pretty much never technologically obsolete when we throw them away and replace them with new ones. That’s planned obsolescence at work.

  The idea of planned obsolescence gained currency in the 1920s and 30s as government and businesspeople realized that our industries were making more Stuff than people cared to, or could afford to, buy. In 1932, a real estate broker named Bernard London who wanted to play his part in stimulating the economy distributed his now infamous pamphlet called Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence. In it London argued for creating a government agency tasked with assigning death dates to specific consumer products, at which time consumers would be required to turn the Stuff in for replacements, even if they still worked fine. This system, London explained, would keep our factories humming along.56

  Some obsolescence was planned to be not just soon but instant—with the advent of disposable goods. The first breakthroughs in this arena were diapers and sanitary pads, and it’s pretty obvious why these particular items caught on. But soon we were sold on disposable cooking pans that don’t need to be washed and disposable barbeques that don’t need to be lugged home from the park. Now we have disposable cameras, mops, rain ponchos, razors, dishes, cutlery, and toilet brushes (flushable, even!).

  Then there are other things that aren’t advertised as disposable but are treated as such in practice. For instance, appliances and electronics break so routinely these days, and it’s become such a hassle to get these items repaired, and new ones are so cheap because of externalized costs, that we just replace them. “We’ll just get another one,” we sigh. I grew up with the same telephone, refrigerator, and kitchen clock, none of which were replaced by my mother for years and years until the fridge finally broke and she gave up the old rotary phone in order to get an answering machine when her kids all went off to college. (She still has the clock.)

  Consumers are not just resigned to the practically disposable nature of this Stuff; we’ve come to accept it. In fact, we barely notice it anymore. That widespread social acceptance of ever quicker obsolescence is key to the success of the system. There were a number of things that had to happen in order for us to become so amenable to it. First, the cost of getting something repaired needs to be close to, or even greater than, the replacement cost, urging us to toss the broken one. Replacement parts and servicing need to be hard to access, which anyone who has called a customer service line recently can verify. Current products must be incompatible with new upgrades or accessories. And the way Stuff looks has to keep changing, providing an incentive to toss an older model, even if it is still working just fine.

  This last quality is what’s known as “perceived obsolescence.” In this case the item isn’t broken, nor is it really obsolete at all; we just perceive it as such. Some people call this “obsolescence of desirability” or “psychological obsolescence.” This is where taste and fashion come in to play. The ever-shifting hem lengths of women’s skirts and dresses; the chunky heels that are in fashion one season only to be replaced by skinny stilettos the next; the width of men’s ties; this year’s hot color for cell phones, iPods, toasters, blenders, couches, even kitchen cabinets: this is all perceived obsolescence at work. It’s not, as I say in The Story of Stuff video, that there’s a raging debate among podiatrists as to whether fat heels or skinny heels provide better orthopedic support. Those twenty-six distinct fashion seasons rushing in and out of stores, which I described in the previous chapter—that’s all part of the strategy of perceived obsolescence. Retailers and producers want you to believe that you can’t wear the same color or cut from one week to the next and that you’ll be less cool, less savvy, and less desirable if you do.

  Now, not every lousy thing that industry has done was intentional and manipulative, but this one was. Corporate decision makers, industrial designers, economic planners, and advertising men actively, strategically promoted planned obsolescence as a way to keep the engine of the economy running. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers (one of my all time favorite reads), social critic Vance Packard documents the early debates about planned obsolescence in consumer products in the 1950s and 60s. While some individuals opposed the idea, worrying that it was unethical and jeopardized their professional credibility, others recognized it as a way to ensure never-ending markets for all the Stuff they designed, produced, and advertised—and they embraced it wholeheartedly. Packard cites Brooks Stevens, who shamelessly explained, “We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then the next year we deliberately introduce something else that will make those products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete... It isn’t organized waste. It’s a sound contribution to the American economy.”57

  The strategy has worked beyond the wildest dreams of the people who instituted it. Planned obsolescence continues to dominate and define consumer culture today, and we dispose of (often perfectly good) products at an ever-increasing rate. In the service of perceived obsolescence in particular, there’s a whole industry hard at work spending billions of dollars each year to manipulate us into buying something new, better, different, and more “us.” That industry is known as... advertising.

  2. Advertising

  Advertising is like a constant background hum in our lives.
The average American spends a total of one year of his/her life watching advertisements,58 while the regular American child sees 110 TV commercials a day.59 By the time she is twenty, the average American has been exposed to nearly a million advertising messages. According to the Center for a New American Dream, brand loyalties are established in children as early as age two, and by the time they get to school, they can identify literally hundreds of logos.60

  While advertising has been with us for generations, its sophistication and scale have made it an entirely different animal than in its earliest days. In the beginning, advertisements were mainly used to announce goods in stock (“Just imported!” “Available now!”) and didn’t necessarily even name specific brands. By the time I was a kid, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, advertising had become a robust industry, but still nothing like it is today. Today, advertisers enlist psychologists, neuroscientists, even trendy consumers themselves to figure out how to best reach and influence more shoppers. Their main intent is to make us feel bad about what we have or what we lack, and to make us want to purchase some specific thing to make us feel better.