What if everything you touched was made to last?
Every gift you give this holiday season will (most likely) be disposable garbage. Most likely, so will every gift you receive. That’s not your fault or the fault of your loved ones—there simply aren’t many other options. This isn't an accident, it's the result of a profound shift in how we create and capture economic value that began nearly a century ago. It’s also a shift I think we can reverse with a fairly simple solution, should we so choose.
We can trace planned obsolescence to the 1920s, when the “Phoebus cartel”—comprising the world's largest lightbulb manufacturers—made a rather extraordinary decision: They deliberately reduced their lightbulbs' lifespan from 2,500 to 1,000 hours while raising prices. The cartel even fined member companies whose bulbs lasted "too long." Meanwhile, in a California fire station, a lightbulb manufactured in 1901 has burned continuously to this day.
The logic of disposability has found its way into virtually everything we touch. Washing machines, refrigerators, and ovens were once built to last 20-30 years. Today’s counterparts last 5-10 at best, with repair costs often exceeding the cost of replacement. Our furniture is now particle board, we’re often lucky if our clothes last more than a season or two, and everything is made of plastic. It's like if restaurants figured out a sneaky way to serve food that made you hungry again in 30 minutes, but for everything you buy. If the intentionally low quality wasn’t insulting enough, it’s also helped create a world of omnipresent ugliness.
The financial sector has accelerated this transformation through "brand harvesting”—the practice by which private equity firms and corporate conglomerates acquire trusted manufacturers with decades-long reputations for quality, then systematically degrade their products while trading on lingering brand reputation. For example:
Pyrex glassware: After its 2005 acquisition, switched from thermal-shock-resistant borosilicate glass to cheaper soda-lime glass, fundamentally eroding the product's core functionality
Maytag appliances: Following their 2006 Whirlpool acquisition, saw their average appliance lifespan drop by nearly 50% in a decade
Craftsman tools: Sold to Stanley Black & Decker in 2017, shifted production overseas and dramatically reduced their legendary warranty coverage
Remington Arms: America's oldest gunmaker saw quality standards plummet after its 2007 acquisition by Cerberus Capital Management, leading to multiple recalls and eventual bankruptcy
Our manufacturing capabilities now surpass anything the great industrialists could have imagined. We have the technology to make nearly perfect products, yet we've chosen artificial scarcity instead. The limitation isn't technical—it's a deliberate business strategy that prioritizes value extraction over value creation.
Children scavenge through a pile of waste at a dump area of Bantar Gebang, Indonesia (AFP via Getty)
Planned obsolescence forces us to use products designed to fail, which robs us by making us buy more, which generates mountains of waste, which fill our bodies with microplastics.
What if we could realign these incentives?
A Lifetime Guarantee, for Everything
While directly banning planned obsolescence presents obvious enforcement challenges, we can achieve the same goal through an incentives-oriented approach: requiring all durable goods to come with a lifetime guarantee from the manufacturer.
Imagine what happens to the quality of everything you buy when its manufacturer retains responsibility for it: Plastic becomes metal. Single-stitch seams become double-stitch seams. Particle board becomes solid wood. Cheap staples and glue become dovetail joins and precision screws. Every purchase would become an investment, every object a potential heirloom.
This isn’t as radical as it sounds. Many manufacturers already offer lifetime guarantees, and these brands are widely beloved. Patagonia clothing, Le Creuset kitchenware, Leatherman tools, Darn Tough socks, Zippo lighters, JanSport backpacks and many other products all come with lifetime or near-lifetime guarantees.
Of course, not everything should last forever unchanged. Some products, particularly in technology, need to evolve to remain useful. A smartphone from 2010 might still physically function, but its software, security, and capabilities would make it effectively obsolete. For these goods, a lifetime guarantee must focus not just durability, but adaptability and maintainability. A well-made laptop should be upgradeable, its components replaceable, its software updateable. This is the difference between an iPhone with a sealed battery designed for replacement every two years, and the Framework laptop designed for component-by-component upgrading over time.
Would universal lifetime guarantees increase the cost of living? Actually, it’d probably make life cheaper.
Sure, requiring lifetime guarantees would almost certainly increase the price of products—but the increase in quality means you won’t be buying it again in a few short years. Remember, extracting more money from consumers is precisely why planned obsolescence exists!
A durability revolution would also expand the options available on secondary markets. You could buy anything used and be far more confident that it will still be in working condition. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that you could buy everything used if you wanted, and ultimately save money even on the sticker price of durable goods.
We can also imagine what might happen to labor markets. One things you’ll notice about manufacturers that currently offer lifetime guarantees is that they are more likely to manufacture domestically. Darn Tough socks are made in Vermont. Zippo lighters are made in Pennsylvania. Leatherman tools are made in Oregon. Planned obsolescence makes outsourced manufacturing appealing to companies in part because low quality is a feature, not a bug—so why pay more for skill and oversight? Universal lifetime guarantees could incentivize some companies to reshore their supply chains and bring back manufacturing jobs. Since high quality becomes imperative to the corporate bottom line, these jobs would likely require more skill and pay more than they did before. We might also expect to see an expansion in hiring of roles specializing in repair and maintenance.
Leatherman’s manufacturing facility in Portland, OR
Darn Tough’s manufacturing facility in Vermont
Still, some might argue that our current economic model relies on increased consumption. But if economic growth requires actively making things worse instead of better, what exactly is the point of that growth? It's a mirage—fake prosperity built on a foundation of waste and planned failure. Relying on things to fall apart because it increases GDP is confusing the map for the territory. Real growth comes from innovation and improvement, not degradation and replacement.
We already know how to make things that last. That 1901 lightbulb isn't alien technology. The knowledge didn't disappear—it was deliberately abandoned as we began to confuse value extraction for value creation. We could recover this knowledge and build an economy that rewards lasting quality over engineered failure.
Yes, this would require careful policy design. We'd need clear definitions of "lifetime" and "durable goods," and robust enforcement mechanisms. Technology would need a thoughtful approach to preserve innovation at the bleeding edge—but these are solvable problems, not insurmountable barriers. I don’t know where the political winds blow on this idea, but if Donald Trump wants to make America great again, making the stuff we buy great (and bringing back the jobs to make them great) seems like a good place to start.
We could actually fix this. We could live in a world where:
Things just work
Repair people have jobs again
Your grandkids fight over who gets your toaster
The garbage patch in the Pacific stops growing
Your socks don't mysteriously develop holes after three washes
What if we already live in a post-scarcity economy, but planned obsolescence has kept us from noticing? Maybe the fabulously wealthy future society we strain to imagine is already here—we just keep breaking all our stuff.
Note: We might also imagine more market-oriented solutions that align incentives in a similar but less extreme manner than universal lifetime guarantees. For example, what if the packaging and online information for every durable good had to prominently display the number of years it was guaranteed for in a standardized format (not unlike nutrition labels on food)? Companies would be free to offer no guarantee at all, but a big zero displayed on the shelf next to 5s, 10s, and 15s of comparable products would be a clear signal to customers where their dollars would be best spent. Policy could instigate more competition of durability instead of mandating it, and I suspect we’d see similar effects.