Great article on planned obsolescence, corporate greed, consumer behavior, and why the thing you just bought that's seemingly the same as the one you replaced actually isn't.
From the article:
We buy, buy, buy, and we’ve been tricked — for far longer than the last decade — into believing that buying more stuff, new stuff is the way. By swapping out slightly used items so frequently, we’re barely pausing to consider if the replacement items are an upgrade, or if we even have the option to repair what we already have. Worse yet, we’re playing into corporate narratives that undercut the labor that makes our items worth keeping.
And:
Learning how to fix your own stuff can be simultaneously overwhelming and empowering, says Zach Dinicola, the founder of Mr. Mixer, a company that repairs KitchenAids in Kansas and other parts of the Midwest. It’s a “crying shame” that there are efforts to make it harder to fix things on your own, he said, which is why he shares tutorials with more than 450,000 followers on TikTok.
“I think that there are more people who want to fix it,” he says. “They just don’t necessarily know it’s an option. People don’t know what they don’t know. There’s a DIY person in all of us. If someone can present the information in a format that’s easy to follow along, more people would be willing to do that.”
The beauty of fixing an object and keeping it around in your life, Dinicola continues, is that the object becomes very sentimental. “That’s one thing that I just know from being in this business,” he says. “These mixers really become part of the family, especially when they’re handed down from grandmother to mother. I’ve worked on third- and fourth-generation mixers that have been handed down from great-grandma to grandma to mom to daughter.”
Great article on planned obsolescence, corporate greed, consumer behavior, and why the thing you just bought that's seemingly the same as the one you replaced actually isn't.
From the article:
And: