Planned Obsolescence

A few weeks ago I spoke of how I was not having good luck with some of the things I use everyday.  The first thing was my camera.  I use it almost everyday and suddenly the LCD screen was not lighting up and it was draining the battery.  I contacted Canon and they told me that it needed service.  They told me where to send it and I must say, I was very impressed with their service.  Eight days from mailing the camera in, I received it back and was not charged anything.

The next major thing to break was our microwave. We were not so lucky with this.   The microwave was less than two years old.  We had remodeled our kitchen and put in all new appliances.  So we called in a repairman because it was the over the stove type with the fan and light and couldn't be easily removed.   He came in and told us that it was a defective magnetron and that he could fix it, but the cost would be more than a new unit.  We said we would get back to him.  A couple days after he left, I wanted to use the light and the timer so I plugged it in again.  The microwave worked.  I thought that the repair person was feeding us a line of baloney.  Five days later it stopped working again.  We checked and the warranty had expired.  So we went shopping and purchased a brand new microwave.  Now we have to put it in and dispose of the old one, which won't be an easy task.

The point of this blog is everything you buy these days has "planned obsolescence".  How many of us have old cell phones, cordless phones, answering machines, computers, microwaves and tons of other stuff?  What do you do with all of it?  You can't just throw it in the landfill.

I remember when I was young.  We had the same refrigerator for most of my young life.  It survived many moves on open trailers in the ice and snow.  It probably is still running somewhere.  Things were meant to last.