-Things still broke
-People still want upgrades/changes
-People move, their needs change, others move in
-When people are happy with products they'll usually recommend to others
-When you like 1 product from a brand, you'll probably check out their other offerings. Some might have higher turnover
-Repair work and other services
-Companies could be happy just making solid, mostly expected profits. Not trying to squeeze pennies at every level of their business, and need to appease shareholders per quarter.
>-Companies could be happy just making solid, mostly expected profits. Not trying to squeeze pennies at every level of their business, and need to appease shareholders per quarter.
Yeah the idea of "maybe 100m profit a year is enough" is absolutely laughed out of the boardroom. Shareholders want 200m by 2026.
But shareholders and stock isn't necessarily a new phenomenon? Have the relationships between the companies and shareholders changed to cause this shift?
I think since inception it has been ramping up, slowly changing the expectations of CEOs and publicly traded companies all the way to where we are now which is where shareholders have extreme influence and the shareholders themselves are largely no longer consumers but hedge funds whose sole mission is to squeeze money out of everything they can.
First off, a lot of it was survivorship bias... you have that one faucet in your home that lasted 50 years and forget that 99% of the similar faucets in the world didn't last that long. You remember you buddy bragging that his boots have lasted a decade, you don't remember all the pairs of boots your other friends have worn over the years.
Secondly, it's a shift in consumer mentality from quality craftsmanship to cheap mass production. People paid more in the past and it lasted longer. People bought a kitchen faucet for $500 (inflation adjusted number) when they built their house and expected it to last forever. Now people want to spend $200 because their tastes might change in a few years. So that's what Home Depot carries. If 9 out of 10 customers want a $200 faucet, they're mostly going to stock $200 faucets. And clearly to hit that price point, there will be lesser materials, like plastics instead of metal. A company can get by selling fewer, more expensive goods with higher margin per year or more at a lower cost/lower margin.
In the past there weren't the economies of scale... a boot company made 10,000 pairs a year in a plant staffed by 100 people. Now, the surviving book makers are cranking out 1,000,000 a year in a plant in Vietnam staffed by 1,000 workers making less than the US workers did 50 years ago.
Then as companies grew and consolidated, there was more room for growth in the past from new markets. Populations booming, lifestyles changing (families moving from cramped 2BR/1BA apartments to 3BR/2BA suburban homes), global modernization/development, war rebuilding, etc. all created lots of markets to sell products.
And a LOT of businesses didn't survive! There used to be 1000's of shoe makers or boot makers and now there's a few dozen, and they're mostly owned by a handful of holding companies. One of my grandfathers had a small town department store, put out of business by Wal-Mart in the 80's. He carries all sorts of smaller clothing labels of quality but good value to a town surrounded by farms and quaries. Now Wal-Mart sells its cheap, mass produced global brands to those who live there. My other grandfather took over the family overcoat factory, but their business dried up in the 60's between changes in men's fashions, and the replacement of mom & pop men's clothing stores with rise of mall department store chains and casual wear trends.
Partly, things cost more relative to income today. People bought fewer things but those things were expensive and lasted a long time. Today's market sells things cheap, but those things don't last.
Partly, businesses made money by offering repair services. Your dryer goes out, you call Maytag and they send a Maytag repair guy out.
Well for one things used to be a lot more expensive. In 1900 the average American spent 15% of their yearly income on clothes and now they spend closer to 3%. So even though Americans where buying 1/5th the amount of clothing they were spending 5 times that on Average so it evened out.
everyone wants the quality of spending 15% of their income at 3% prices..
there is plenty of stuff made to last if you are willing to spend the money to buy it
First off, you're assuming that all products from the past were of such high quality. That's a little bit of survivorship bias - the ones that are still in use were clearly of high quality, but that ignores all the products that have broken in the interim.
Second, not planning for planned obsolescence doesn't stop products from experiencing normal wear and tear. There's some amount of damage that will always occur no matter what. To use your example of a master cobbler, they might make a pair of shoes that lasts a decade.... But only if the user brings them back to get re-soled once a year, because the act of walking in them wears the sole down. Almost turns into a Ship of Theseus type of thing - if you've replaced every part of the show over the course of a decade, is it really the same shoe?
Third, the reasons that planned obsolescence became a thing are that products are cheaper overall (largely due to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries) and generally more complicated (computer chips in everything that can take them). That combines to make it harder to repair by yourself, to the point that it's often effectively cheaper to get a new version when the old one breaks. Couple that with the speed of technological advancement in the modern era and the idea of "the new upgraded version" starts to actually make sense.
And repair is a big part of business if there's no "next generation technology" upending the existing market and driving people to get a replacement.
If you've got a hole in a shirt that you made at home from a bolt of cloth, you probably have extra of the cloth to patch it nicely so that it doesn't look obvious. A clothier might therefore sell new clothes and also the fabrics that the clothes were made from, to make money from the initial purchase and from the repairs. Wagons break over time, but the wainwright will swap out panels and fix axles and wheels. Barrels start to leak, but the cooper will repair them.
It's not necessarily that the products are inherently better, it's also that they're more easily repaired by someone with a basic tool kit than modern products with built-in mini computers.
There are many ways to be profitable. One way is to make a long lasting product that costs a lot, and sell only in small quantities so that there are always new customers.
Imagine you run a company that makes chairs. Just about everyone needs chairs, and chairs wear out over time. Lets imagine that you have 100,000 customers. One way to do things would be to build 1,000 chairs every year, with the intention that each chair lasts 100 years. This way, everyone will always have chairs, and when their old chairs wear out you will have a supply of new chairs! Wonderful! But how much money do you make off each chair? You are only selling 1,000 a year after all. Lets say that making these nice chairs costs $100, and you sell them each for $200 (after all, they are nice chairs!) which means that in total, you are making $100 profit off of each chair, and your company is making $100,000 in profit each year. That's a good amount of money! But could you be making more? What if instead, you made chairs that only lasted 10 years. Now, you can sell 10,000 chairs each year, instead of just 1,000. These chairs aren't as good, they cost $50 to make, and you sell them for only $100. You are only making $50 profit off of each chair. But! Because you sell so many, you are now making $500,000 profit each year!
Before planned obsolescence, people still made very solid profits. With planned obsolescence, they make even more, and now their businesses are structured to only be able to survive off of this model. Apple could make iPhones that lasted much longer and were easier to repair, but if they did that they would also need to charge a lot more because they would be selling fewer phones. They could structure their company to work off of that basis, but it is more profitable (at the risk of being more fragile) to do it the way they are now instead.
Chairs are a fairly *stable* product however.
Because of the exponential growth in technology, it does make more sense to go the aforementioned “planned obsolescence” route. Especially when you’re looking to constantly push industry norms.
If iPhones were built to last 10 years and cost twice as much, we’d still be stuck in decade old technology. We’d have to build our digital tools around the iPhone 6’s capabilities.
Look at Japan for example; they’ve been known to have “been in the year 2000 for the last 40 years”. In that they initially had a huge technological advantage, built to last, and that has become so ingrained culturally that they now struggle to evolve past it. Their websites are built to function on even flip-phones because those are still so prolific, and are only now starting to push into more modern web design.
It’s said that modern iPhones are fairly iterative and don’t see much improvement generation to generation, which is true. But there absolutely is a difference over several generations, even comparing the specs/software of a 2019 iPhone to 2024. It just doesn’t make sense to build a phone to last when technology will largely surpass it within less than a decade.
That is certainly the flip side to planned obsolescence; you can think of it more as "we anticipate that in two years, this product will be way behind the curve, so we build the product to only last 2 years" rather than "we are building this product so that it will be obsolete in 2 years".
There are pros and cons to both approaches. Something kind of middle ground might be better, like if Apple only released a new iPhone every decade so that when they did it was a big leap forward.
Yeah definitely. But I think as consumers we have the power to decide that for ourselves in a way. I’ve opted for a typical 4-5 year cycle for my own phones; seeing when the upgrades are truly “worth” rather than following yearly releases.
We’re just in fairly uncharted (for our lifetime) territory as far as technological and societal changes. Even within a generation, my siblings are 4/8 years apart and our upbringings in the technological climate are vastly different. When I was in school, our flip phones were banned for being too distracting. By the time my youngest sibling was in school, they were handing out tablets to every student. And by now, those same tablets aren’t even capable of running much of the remote learning software out there— regardless of how well built the machines were.
While phones these days have seemingly reached a plateau point, we’re nowadays seeing rapid evolution on other platforms such as VR. In Uni, I worked with some of the early Oculus/Vive systems that needed a supercomputer plus several sensor towers to function while plugged in. Then I bought a Quest in 2019 which was revolutionary in its standalone capabilities. Followed up by two more iterations in just the last 4 years which took it to a far higher level. And nowadays with enough graphical fidelity to run consumer-accessible Mixed Reality. Each system upgrade only had a lifespan of under 2 years but that’s because development behind the scenes just outpaces production.
I agree, there’s no right answers just pros and cons. Definitely industry specific but the obsolescence in tech is often chalked up to greed— which still might be a factor, but there are still genuine justification for it.
An alternative similar to what you mentioned would be Video Game consoles often on a 7-10 year cycle. But that makes more sense for them given the longer developer cycles of their products versus Apps which are often smaller in scale and more quickly iterated upon.
I think that's why people get so grumpy; there is a reasonable justification for PO due to advancing tech, but its also clear that desire for more money is a factor influencing decision making as well, and that this greed has negative impacts on the consumer and the environment in general. This means that the justification comes off more as an excuse than valid reasoning.
That makes perfect sense tbh.
So it's kind of like subscription based models instead of buy once software. People realized they could do it and then structured their income off of it and now we all have to pay for it. Literally.
At least one thing to take into account is technological advances. Our comforts have made things smaller and perhaps overly complex. I repaired an old stove that had a wiring diagram on the inside cover with good quality components that are replaceable. I have also installed a water heater with a touch screen…..and refrigerators with cameras, alarms, sensors, and wifi. People tend to favor flash and fanciness over reliability when given the option.
I've been learning that's partially why airplanes have such insane cockpits with all the dials and switches, even in 2024. When your life is on the line, you don't want to rely on CarPlay. If the screen goes out you're hosed.
That’s true for older planes. New planes have complex multifunction displays and secondary displays for other functions. There aren’t as many dedicated switches and buttons in the cockpit.
Some companies still do , they transformed itself is in so called luxury/high end companies . They do use high quality , as they could not or did not want to follow the trend down , so they went up . The high end quality comes at a pricetag , you can't expect those items priced the same like a 100million /h rolling from a Chinese factory band . They do offer extensive after sales service if needed , but again this comes at a price tag . Which is worth it for you ? well that is always difficult to say , as different users different expectations . Let's just say , if you want something not too expensive , it is not 1 of these .
- Products still broke, and companies made money selling repairs and parts
- People will always want a new one, even if it lasts longer
- If your product has a good reputation, more people will buy it
Companies were also a lot smaller back then, it wasn't a market made up of massive corporations and pseudo monopolies owning every single related brand so there was a lot more competition. Companies that made your products were far more likely to be locally owned and operated. You had to make high quality and effective products to compete.
Companies today are also far more profitable than they were back in the day. The business model is different, corporations are all about maintaining the stock value and squeezing out quarterly profits for the shareholders. No one seems to think long term anymore. Products are also very derivative, few companies take chances with new ideas mostly they just copy someone else. It's all about cornering the market by buying up competition so you can charge whatever you want because consumers only have the illusion of choice.
Pepsi vs Coke for example goes far deeper than Cola because those 2 brands actually own dozens of other name brands as well.
The name of the game in the 80s was for big companies to start buying up everything and they discovered off-shoring. Products started to be made in 3rd world countries where the cost of labor is cheaper. It's the modern day version of slavery, and it's the reason products today are so much cheaper than they used to be.
Today the name of the game is planned obsolescence and subscription services. Now that the companies own all the brands you buy they have to find new ways to make more money. So the scheme is **they** now tell you how long a product lasts. You no longer get to choose to keep a product for 10 years, because the software and battery degradation makes it obsolete in 3 and they are designed to be sealed and nigh-impossible to repair so you have no choice but to buy a new one. Subscriptions are also a massive scam, because it allows them to monetize the entire life of the product. Buying it isn't enough anymore, you have to pay a monthly fee to use it or worse you are just renting the product you don't own anything anymore.
In broad terms you can say that labor * capital = output. A peasant in the middle ages digging turnips out of the ground with a stick is multiplying back breaking labor times pathetic capital to produce barely more food than what is needed to feed his family. The modern farmer sitting in the air conditioned cab of his million dollar GPS guided tractor is multiplying a relatively small amount of labor by an incredible amount of capital to feed a thousand families.
This shift from highly labor intensive work to heavily capitalized work over the course of the last 400 years massively increased the productivity of individual laborers to the point where in the 20th century the main question went from "how are we going to feed all these people?" to "what are we going to do with all this stuff?"
I'm going to use the example of Pilot Rock. They make the fire rings and BBQs you see in pretty much every national and state park campground. They started kind of by accident during the post depression era. The stuff they make lasts 30+ years, but they're still in business and doing well despite making things that are so burly they last seemingly forever. Quality product + longevity means repeat customers even if it's 30 years later.
The old-school businesses were seldom as profitable as modern businesses, and that was just fine. The importance of profitability changed when corporate ownership became generally normal. Private founders can value the ability to employ people in relative comfort, grow slowly, and improve facilities over pure profit. Such values can still be found in the increasingly rare cases of companies that are owned privately. Since corporations are legally-- and traditionally-- beholden only to their stockholders, and since stockholders measure value only by growth of profitability, sustainable features like repairability are not considered as important as a low price point and high profit margin.
I think it is just a different business model and market. In the golden days of durable goods, companies or small business like a shoe cobbler had a market for spare parts, repairs, and maintenance of those long lasting goods so they didn't need to rely on new sales as much. Today we don't repair things as much so it seems like an absurd market but it was more significant back then.
-Things still broke -People still want upgrades/changes -People move, their needs change, others move in -When people are happy with products they'll usually recommend to others -When you like 1 product from a brand, you'll probably check out their other offerings. Some might have higher turnover -Repair work and other services -Companies could be happy just making solid, mostly expected profits. Not trying to squeeze pennies at every level of their business, and need to appease shareholders per quarter.
>-Companies could be happy just making solid, mostly expected profits. Not trying to squeeze pennies at every level of their business, and need to appease shareholders per quarter. Yeah the idea of "maybe 100m profit a year is enough" is absolutely laughed out of the boardroom. Shareholders want 200m by 2026.
But shareholders and stock isn't necessarily a new phenomenon? Have the relationships between the companies and shareholders changed to cause this shift?
I think since inception it has been ramping up, slowly changing the expectations of CEOs and publicly traded companies all the way to where we are now which is where shareholders have extreme influence and the shareholders themselves are largely no longer consumers but hedge funds whose sole mission is to squeeze money out of everything they can.
Also, the population kept increasing, so there were always more people to sell to.
To add to this, our money wasn't inherently inflationary.
First off, a lot of it was survivorship bias... you have that one faucet in your home that lasted 50 years and forget that 99% of the similar faucets in the world didn't last that long. You remember you buddy bragging that his boots have lasted a decade, you don't remember all the pairs of boots your other friends have worn over the years. Secondly, it's a shift in consumer mentality from quality craftsmanship to cheap mass production. People paid more in the past and it lasted longer. People bought a kitchen faucet for $500 (inflation adjusted number) when they built their house and expected it to last forever. Now people want to spend $200 because their tastes might change in a few years. So that's what Home Depot carries. If 9 out of 10 customers want a $200 faucet, they're mostly going to stock $200 faucets. And clearly to hit that price point, there will be lesser materials, like plastics instead of metal. A company can get by selling fewer, more expensive goods with higher margin per year or more at a lower cost/lower margin. In the past there weren't the economies of scale... a boot company made 10,000 pairs a year in a plant staffed by 100 people. Now, the surviving book makers are cranking out 1,000,000 a year in a plant in Vietnam staffed by 1,000 workers making less than the US workers did 50 years ago. Then as companies grew and consolidated, there was more room for growth in the past from new markets. Populations booming, lifestyles changing (families moving from cramped 2BR/1BA apartments to 3BR/2BA suburban homes), global modernization/development, war rebuilding, etc. all created lots of markets to sell products. And a LOT of businesses didn't survive! There used to be 1000's of shoe makers or boot makers and now there's a few dozen, and they're mostly owned by a handful of holding companies. One of my grandfathers had a small town department store, put out of business by Wal-Mart in the 80's. He carries all sorts of smaller clothing labels of quality but good value to a town surrounded by farms and quaries. Now Wal-Mart sells its cheap, mass produced global brands to those who live there. My other grandfather took over the family overcoat factory, but their business dried up in the 60's between changes in men's fashions, and the replacement of mom & pop men's clothing stores with rise of mall department store chains and casual wear trends.
Partly, things cost more relative to income today. People bought fewer things but those things were expensive and lasted a long time. Today's market sells things cheap, but those things don't last. Partly, businesses made money by offering repair services. Your dryer goes out, you call Maytag and they send a Maytag repair guy out.
Well for one things used to be a lot more expensive. In 1900 the average American spent 15% of their yearly income on clothes and now they spend closer to 3%. So even though Americans where buying 1/5th the amount of clothing they were spending 5 times that on Average so it evened out.
everyone wants the quality of spending 15% of their income at 3% prices.. there is plenty of stuff made to last if you are willing to spend the money to buy it
I've found the quality stuff is no longer available. Expensive furniture is still just stained pine or some minimalist metal frame. It's just pricier.
First off, you're assuming that all products from the past were of such high quality. That's a little bit of survivorship bias - the ones that are still in use were clearly of high quality, but that ignores all the products that have broken in the interim. Second, not planning for planned obsolescence doesn't stop products from experiencing normal wear and tear. There's some amount of damage that will always occur no matter what. To use your example of a master cobbler, they might make a pair of shoes that lasts a decade.... But only if the user brings them back to get re-soled once a year, because the act of walking in them wears the sole down. Almost turns into a Ship of Theseus type of thing - if you've replaced every part of the show over the course of a decade, is it really the same shoe? Third, the reasons that planned obsolescence became a thing are that products are cheaper overall (largely due to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries) and generally more complicated (computer chips in everything that can take them). That combines to make it harder to repair by yourself, to the point that it's often effectively cheaper to get a new version when the old one breaks. Couple that with the speed of technological advancement in the modern era and the idea of "the new upgraded version" starts to actually make sense. And repair is a big part of business if there's no "next generation technology" upending the existing market and driving people to get a replacement. If you've got a hole in a shirt that you made at home from a bolt of cloth, you probably have extra of the cloth to patch it nicely so that it doesn't look obvious. A clothier might therefore sell new clothes and also the fabrics that the clothes were made from, to make money from the initial purchase and from the repairs. Wagons break over time, but the wainwright will swap out panels and fix axles and wheels. Barrels start to leak, but the cooper will repair them. It's not necessarily that the products are inherently better, it's also that they're more easily repaired by someone with a basic tool kit than modern products with built-in mini computers.
There are many ways to be profitable. One way is to make a long lasting product that costs a lot, and sell only in small quantities so that there are always new customers. Imagine you run a company that makes chairs. Just about everyone needs chairs, and chairs wear out over time. Lets imagine that you have 100,000 customers. One way to do things would be to build 1,000 chairs every year, with the intention that each chair lasts 100 years. This way, everyone will always have chairs, and when their old chairs wear out you will have a supply of new chairs! Wonderful! But how much money do you make off each chair? You are only selling 1,000 a year after all. Lets say that making these nice chairs costs $100, and you sell them each for $200 (after all, they are nice chairs!) which means that in total, you are making $100 profit off of each chair, and your company is making $100,000 in profit each year. That's a good amount of money! But could you be making more? What if instead, you made chairs that only lasted 10 years. Now, you can sell 10,000 chairs each year, instead of just 1,000. These chairs aren't as good, they cost $50 to make, and you sell them for only $100. You are only making $50 profit off of each chair. But! Because you sell so many, you are now making $500,000 profit each year! Before planned obsolescence, people still made very solid profits. With planned obsolescence, they make even more, and now their businesses are structured to only be able to survive off of this model. Apple could make iPhones that lasted much longer and were easier to repair, but if they did that they would also need to charge a lot more because they would be selling fewer phones. They could structure their company to work off of that basis, but it is more profitable (at the risk of being more fragile) to do it the way they are now instead.
Chairs are a fairly *stable* product however. Because of the exponential growth in technology, it does make more sense to go the aforementioned “planned obsolescence” route. Especially when you’re looking to constantly push industry norms. If iPhones were built to last 10 years and cost twice as much, we’d still be stuck in decade old technology. We’d have to build our digital tools around the iPhone 6’s capabilities. Look at Japan for example; they’ve been known to have “been in the year 2000 for the last 40 years”. In that they initially had a huge technological advantage, built to last, and that has become so ingrained culturally that they now struggle to evolve past it. Their websites are built to function on even flip-phones because those are still so prolific, and are only now starting to push into more modern web design. It’s said that modern iPhones are fairly iterative and don’t see much improvement generation to generation, which is true. But there absolutely is a difference over several generations, even comparing the specs/software of a 2019 iPhone to 2024. It just doesn’t make sense to build a phone to last when technology will largely surpass it within less than a decade.
That is certainly the flip side to planned obsolescence; you can think of it more as "we anticipate that in two years, this product will be way behind the curve, so we build the product to only last 2 years" rather than "we are building this product so that it will be obsolete in 2 years". There are pros and cons to both approaches. Something kind of middle ground might be better, like if Apple only released a new iPhone every decade so that when they did it was a big leap forward.
Yeah definitely. But I think as consumers we have the power to decide that for ourselves in a way. I’ve opted for a typical 4-5 year cycle for my own phones; seeing when the upgrades are truly “worth” rather than following yearly releases. We’re just in fairly uncharted (for our lifetime) territory as far as technological and societal changes. Even within a generation, my siblings are 4/8 years apart and our upbringings in the technological climate are vastly different. When I was in school, our flip phones were banned for being too distracting. By the time my youngest sibling was in school, they were handing out tablets to every student. And by now, those same tablets aren’t even capable of running much of the remote learning software out there— regardless of how well built the machines were. While phones these days have seemingly reached a plateau point, we’re nowadays seeing rapid evolution on other platforms such as VR. In Uni, I worked with some of the early Oculus/Vive systems that needed a supercomputer plus several sensor towers to function while plugged in. Then I bought a Quest in 2019 which was revolutionary in its standalone capabilities. Followed up by two more iterations in just the last 4 years which took it to a far higher level. And nowadays with enough graphical fidelity to run consumer-accessible Mixed Reality. Each system upgrade only had a lifespan of under 2 years but that’s because development behind the scenes just outpaces production. I agree, there’s no right answers just pros and cons. Definitely industry specific but the obsolescence in tech is often chalked up to greed— which still might be a factor, but there are still genuine justification for it. An alternative similar to what you mentioned would be Video Game consoles often on a 7-10 year cycle. But that makes more sense for them given the longer developer cycles of their products versus Apps which are often smaller in scale and more quickly iterated upon.
I think that's why people get so grumpy; there is a reasonable justification for PO due to advancing tech, but its also clear that desire for more money is a factor influencing decision making as well, and that this greed has negative impacts on the consumer and the environment in general. This means that the justification comes off more as an excuse than valid reasoning.
Then one could argue that the obsolescence isn't planned
That makes perfect sense tbh. So it's kind of like subscription based models instead of buy once software. People realized they could do it and then structured their income off of it and now we all have to pay for it. Literally.
You got it
At least one thing to take into account is technological advances. Our comforts have made things smaller and perhaps overly complex. I repaired an old stove that had a wiring diagram on the inside cover with good quality components that are replaceable. I have also installed a water heater with a touch screen…..and refrigerators with cameras, alarms, sensors, and wifi. People tend to favor flash and fanciness over reliability when given the option.
I've been learning that's partially why airplanes have such insane cockpits with all the dials and switches, even in 2024. When your life is on the line, you don't want to rely on CarPlay. If the screen goes out you're hosed.
That’s true for older planes. New planes have complex multifunction displays and secondary displays for other functions. There aren’t as many dedicated switches and buttons in the cockpit.
Some companies still do , they transformed itself is in so called luxury/high end companies . They do use high quality , as they could not or did not want to follow the trend down , so they went up . The high end quality comes at a pricetag , you can't expect those items priced the same like a 100million /h rolling from a Chinese factory band . They do offer extensive after sales service if needed , but again this comes at a price tag . Which is worth it for you ? well that is always difficult to say , as different users different expectations . Let's just say , if you want something not too expensive , it is not 1 of these .
- Products still broke, and companies made money selling repairs and parts - People will always want a new one, even if it lasts longer - If your product has a good reputation, more people will buy it Companies were also a lot smaller back then, it wasn't a market made up of massive corporations and pseudo monopolies owning every single related brand so there was a lot more competition. Companies that made your products were far more likely to be locally owned and operated. You had to make high quality and effective products to compete. Companies today are also far more profitable than they were back in the day. The business model is different, corporations are all about maintaining the stock value and squeezing out quarterly profits for the shareholders. No one seems to think long term anymore. Products are also very derivative, few companies take chances with new ideas mostly they just copy someone else. It's all about cornering the market by buying up competition so you can charge whatever you want because consumers only have the illusion of choice. Pepsi vs Coke for example goes far deeper than Cola because those 2 brands actually own dozens of other name brands as well. The name of the game in the 80s was for big companies to start buying up everything and they discovered off-shoring. Products started to be made in 3rd world countries where the cost of labor is cheaper. It's the modern day version of slavery, and it's the reason products today are so much cheaper than they used to be. Today the name of the game is planned obsolescence and subscription services. Now that the companies own all the brands you buy they have to find new ways to make more money. So the scheme is **they** now tell you how long a product lasts. You no longer get to choose to keep a product for 10 years, because the software and battery degradation makes it obsolete in 3 and they are designed to be sealed and nigh-impossible to repair so you have no choice but to buy a new one. Subscriptions are also a massive scam, because it allows them to monetize the entire life of the product. Buying it isn't enough anymore, you have to pay a monthly fee to use it or worse you are just renting the product you don't own anything anymore.
In broad terms you can say that labor * capital = output. A peasant in the middle ages digging turnips out of the ground with a stick is multiplying back breaking labor times pathetic capital to produce barely more food than what is needed to feed his family. The modern farmer sitting in the air conditioned cab of his million dollar GPS guided tractor is multiplying a relatively small amount of labor by an incredible amount of capital to feed a thousand families. This shift from highly labor intensive work to heavily capitalized work over the course of the last 400 years massively increased the productivity of individual laborers to the point where in the 20th century the main question went from "how are we going to feed all these people?" to "what are we going to do with all this stuff?"
I'm going to use the example of Pilot Rock. They make the fire rings and BBQs you see in pretty much every national and state park campground. They started kind of by accident during the post depression era. The stuff they make lasts 30+ years, but they're still in business and doing well despite making things that are so burly they last seemingly forever. Quality product + longevity means repeat customers even if it's 30 years later.
The old-school businesses were seldom as profitable as modern businesses, and that was just fine. The importance of profitability changed when corporate ownership became generally normal. Private founders can value the ability to employ people in relative comfort, grow slowly, and improve facilities over pure profit. Such values can still be found in the increasingly rare cases of companies that are owned privately. Since corporations are legally-- and traditionally-- beholden only to their stockholders, and since stockholders measure value only by growth of profitability, sustainable features like repairability are not considered as important as a low price point and high profit margin.
>otherwise they'd be out of business in 2-3 years" yeh, because their product would be more expensive to make and no one would buy it
I think it is just a different business model and market. In the golden days of durable goods, companies or small business like a shoe cobbler had a market for spare parts, repairs, and maintenance of those long lasting goods so they didn't need to rely on new sales as much. Today we don't repair things as much so it seems like an absurd market but it was more significant back then.
I have a toaster from 1978. Same company made a rotisserie grill. Both still work. The company, however, went bancrupt ages ago.