The Day the World Stops Shopping

J.B. MacKinnon

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062856043
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Consuming less is our best strategy for saving the planet—but can we do it? In this thoughtful and surprisingly optimistic book, journalist J. B. MacKinnon investigates how we may achieve a world without shopping. We can't stop shopping. And yet we must. This is the consumer dilemma.

The economy says we must always consume more: even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, and home foreclosure.

The planet says we consume too much: in America, we burn the earth's resources at a rate five times faster than it can regenerate. And despite efforts to "green" our consumption—by recycling, increasing energy efficiency, or using solar power—we have yet to see a decline in global carbon emissions.

Addressing this paradox head-on, acclaimed journalist J. B. MacKinnon asks, What would really happen if we simply stopped shopping? Is there a way to reduce our consumption to earth-saving levels without triggering economic collapse? At first this question took him around the world, seeking answers from America's big-box stores to the hunter-gatherer cultures of Namibia to communities in Ecuador that consume at an exactly sustainable rate. Then the thought experiment came shockingly true: the coronavirus brought shopping to a halt, and MacKinnon's ideas were tested in real time.

Drawing from experts in fields ranging from climate change to economics, MacKinnon investigates how living with less would change our planet, our society, and ourselves. Along the way, he reveals just how much we stand to gain: An investment in our physical and emotional wellness. The pleasure of caring for our possessions. Closer relationships with our natural world and one another. Imaginative and inspiring, The Day the World Stops Shopping will embolden you to envision another way.

III

Adaptation

11.

A Stronger, Not a Weaker, Attachment to Our Things

The lightbulb that has brightened the garage at Fire Department Station 6 in Livermore, California, for the past 120 years will never burn out. Instead, it will “expire.” When it does, it certainly won’t be thrown out, or even recycled. It will be “laid to rest.”

“You have to use the correct terminology,” said Tom Bramell, a retired deputy fire chief, with a light laugh. When I spoke to Bramell, who so cuts the figure of a firefighter that he has smoke-coloured eyes and hair, and a permanent hack from smoke inhalation (“I do a bag of cough drops a day”), he had become the Livermore light’s leading historian. The bulb has been on almost continuously since 1901; in 2015, it surpassed a million hours in service, making it, according to Guinness World Records, the longest-burning in the world. Viewable online, it has fans around the globe. The bulb has already outlasted multiple webcams.

The parts and materials that made it so durable are something of a mystery, for the straightforward reason that you can’t dissect a light that is always on. Here’s what is known about the bulb: it was manufactured circa 1900 by Shelby Electric, of Ohio, using a design by the French-American inventor Adolphe Chaillet. It has a carbon filament of about the same human-hair thickness as the ones, typically made of tungsten, that are found in modern bulbs. It was made to be a sixty-watt bulb, though it currently illuminates the Station 6 garage with about the brightness of a nightlight. Shelby bulbs of the same vintage have been studied to gain more insight, but it turned out the company was experimenting with a variety of designs at the time.

The most surprising aspect of the bulb is that it is incandescent, meaning it produces light by electrically heating a filament until it glows white-hot. Fire in a bottle, as they say. This is exactly the same technology still used to produce bulbs with frustratingly short lifespans that you have to buy again and again. Plug in a typical incandescent bulb from the drugstore, and you can expect it to burn for about a thousand hours; if you leave it on full-time, you can expect it to die about forty-two days later.

“We don’t build things today to last,” Bramell said, surely speaking for almost all of us.

Most people seem to agree that the products we buy today are subject to what the economist Robert Solow, borrowing from an anonymous German friend, called Das Gesetz der Verschlechtigung aller Dinge, or the Law of the Deterioration of Everything. But it’s important to be sure that this is not nostalgia for an imaginary past. Is it really the case that the products we buy today are worse than they were five, ten or twenty years ago?

“For consumer products, I would say that’s definitely true,” David Enos, a materials scientist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told me. Enos, who works at Sandia National Laboratories, the caretakers of America’s nuclear stockpile, is a specialist in product durability. His job is to make things that can endure under extreme duress for very long periods of time. He has, for example, explored how to produce containers that can be stored inside a mountain in an atmosphere of pure steam for as long as it takes for nuclear waste to decompose into a harmless substance. “A hundred, thousand, million-type years are the time frames that we’re aiming for there,” he said.

Earlier in his career, though, Enos had a job working on electrical circuits for ordinary inkjet printers. The machines had twenty-millionths of an inch of gold over their copper traces to prevent them from corroding. “At twenty micro-inches, you’re kind of flirting with the cliff, where if you go below that, the durability drops off really rapidly,” Enos said. You know what happens then: your printer stops working and you need to buy a new one.

If a company used twenty-five micro-inches of gold over their traces, the printer would be much more reliable, Enos said. The problem then is that most people wouldn’t buy it, because the competing printer with just twenty micro-inches of gold would cost less. “We have a mindset now where we buy things as inexpensive as possible,” said Enos. “Could we build a phone that would last ten years? No problem. We certainly have the technology to do that. But the costs start going higher and higher. Nobody wants to spend five or ten thousand dollars on a phone and say, hey, this phone’s going to last ten years. Most people are like, well, that’s great, I don’t care. I want a new one after two or three years.”

All of that changes on the day the world stops shopping, when the more durable product becomes the common sense choice. If you are trying to buy as few phones or printers as you can in your lifetime, you are prepared to pay more for a phone or printer that lasts. You want to buy fewer, better things.

Unfortunately, we aren’t sure how an economy founded on those kinds of products actually works.

The journey from good, long-lasting lightbulbs like the one hanging in the Livermore fire station to the disposable bulbs we know today began in 1924. That year, representatives from the world’s largest lighting companies—including such familiar names as Philips, Osram, and General Electric—met in Switzerland to form Phoebus, arguably the first corporate cartel with global reach. At the time, inventors were steadily increasing bulb lifespans, which was creating what one senior member of Phoebus described as a “mire” in sales turnover. Once everyone had filled their home with long-lasting bulbs, hardly anyone needed to buy new ones.

The member companies of Phoebus agreed to depress lamp life to a thousand-hour standard. More than three decades later, in 1960, muckraking journalist Vance Packard popularized the term “planned obsolescence” to describe manufacturers’ deliberate efforts to design products so that they are quickly used up, stop working, fall apart, cannot be fixed, or otherwise become stale-dated. The Phoebus cartel’s decision to shorten bulb lifespans is considered one of the earliest examples of planned obsolescence at an industrial scale.

Phoebus is easily cast as a conspiracy of big-business evil-doers. It even makes an appearance as such in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the shadowy organization sends an agent in asbestos-lined gloves and seven-inch heels to seize die-hard bulbs that burn beyond their thousandth hour of service. “Through no bulb shall the mean operating life be extended,” Pynchon writes, turning product standardization into a metaphor for oppression and social conformity. “You can imagine what it would do to the market if that started happening.”

At the time the thousand-hour bulb was established, however, planned obsolescence was not a secret. Instead, it was openly discussed as a solution to an increasingly serious problem. The Industrial Revolution was making it possible to produce enormous quantities of goods quickly and cheaply. Yet if a factory made a quality product with a long lifespan, before long there would be little demand for what the factory supplied. Economists and businesspeople began to argue that, unless you dealt in coffins, it was bad business and unsound economics to sell a person any product only once. It would enrich society more, they said, to seek a balance between lower quality and more frequent sales. (At the time there was little concern about finite resources or the destruction of the natural world.) By the late 1920s, the repetitive sales model had become so popular that a leading financier declared obsolescence the “new god” of the American business elite.

Advocates for shorter product lifespans could be found across the political spectrum. Giles Slade, in his book Made to Break, traces the term “planned obsolescence” to its roots. The earliest reference he found was in a 1932 pamphlet, “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence,” that promoted short-lived products as beneficial to the working class. In 1936, a similarly themed essay in the magazine Printers’ Ink declared durable products “outmoded” and warned, “If Merchandise Does Not Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed.”

This Depression-era argument, which one business writer of the time summed up as a “sound and genuine philosophy in free spending and wasting,” became another crucial part of the modern consumer economy. We wouldn’t buy a product once; we would buy it again and again throughout our lives. We would shop and reshop. Repetitive consumption is now built into almost everything we buy, and obsolescence has become, as Slade puts it, “a touchstone of the American consciousness.”

Thirty years ago, a new technology emerged that threatened to challenge planned obsolescence. It was the kind of product we would want in a deconsumer society: long-lasting, energy efficient, better in every way than what it was designed to replace. It came in the form of a lightbulb.

The first light-emitting diode was demonstrated at a GE facility in Syracuse, New York, in 1962, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that LEDs could produce white light more efficiently than incandescent bulbs. They are a genuinely revolutionary technology, so much so that their widespread adoption is considered an important step toward slowing climate change.

The bulbs have legendary durability. The basic building block of LED technology is the semiconductor, which easily can be made to last. Bulbs that promise a 50,000-hour lifespan are not uncommon—forget to turn one off and it will burn for nearly six years. Hardware store LED bulbs more often offer a still-impressive 25,000-hour lifespan. In a typical American household, each light is turned on for an average of just 1.6 hours daily. Under normal conditions, then, a thoroughly ordinary LED lamp would do its job for forty-two years.

By 2019, the sale of LED lamps was a booming business that also seemed to be a sign that the deconsumer story didn’t have to end in collapse. It could also spark an age of “good growth,” as businesses created quality products to replace the throwaway stuff of the past. Grow the good, shrink the bad.

LEDs also showed, however, that good growth wouldn’t last forever. The lighting industry has a term, “socket saturation,” that describes the point at which most of the world’s short-lived incandescent bulbs have been unscrewed from their sockets and replaced by durable LEDs. At that point, in theory at least, the world stops shopping for lightbulbs. What happens to the lighting industry when everyone’s bulbs last half a lifetime? As Fabian Hoelzenbein, a London-based lighting market analyst, put it, “That’s the billion-dollar question.”

Toward the end of the 2010s, “socket saturation” seemed to be just around the corner. It never arrived, though, because LEDs were assimilated by consumer culture. We’ve already seen one way that this occurred: we took the money LEDs saved us and used it to buy a lot more lights. Then, in the same way that long-lasting incandescent bulbs were soon followed by short-lived incandescent bulbs in the 1920s, long-lasting LEDs were followed by short-lived LEDs. A profusion of new manufacturers, most of them in Asia, rapidly drove down cost and quality. A durable technology was turning into a disposable one.

“You can buy bulbs on eBay that are of such low quality that, when you screw them in, you can actually get a shock,” Hoelzenbein told me. He’d heard reports from China of people buying bargain LED lightbulbs by the kilogram, knowing some would last and others might not work at all.

Some governments put in place minimum lifespan standards for LED bulbs in order to hang on to the benefits of their durability. Even so, another way to sell more bulbs emerged, and that was to build LEDs into goods still subject to planned obsolescence. A “smart” lighting industry emerged, with products that, for example, gradually brighten your bedroom when it’s time to wake up or set off explosions of light as you play your video games. Light fixtures became a locus for the internet of things, connecting to speakers, security systems and other devices. In other words, LED lighting underwent “gadgetization,” making it susceptible to the constant upgrades familiar from phones, tablets and other digital products. “We’re not inventing this consumer behaviour. It’s what technology companies do,” Betty Noonan, a spokesperson for Cree, an American company specializing in LEDs, told me. “I have replaced more damned flat-panel TVs in my home, just because they got thinner and brighter, than I care to even tell you.”

In a world that stops shopping, on the other hand, we wouldn’t buy more LED bulbs with the savings from energy efficiency, and we’d prefer long-lasting bulbs over short-lived ones. We would be far more skeptical of the need for digital upgrades. As a result, we would come face to face with the question, unanswered since the early twentieth century, of how to manage a society founded on good, long-lasting stuff.

“My starting point is, get the economics right,” said Tim Cooper, a design professor who heads the sustainable consumption research group at Nottingham Trent University, and has been researching product durability for nearly thirty years. We tend to think of the consumer economy as highly complex, and in many ways it is: a baffling system where cotton grown on one continent may be spun into fibre on another and made into a T-shirt on yet another; a contradictory place where investors can move their money around the globe at the speed of an algorithm but most workers cannot freely cross a single national border in search of work. Yet the basic operating principle of that economy is straightforward. Goods and services are produced for consumption, nearly all of which is carried out by or on behalf of individual consumers. (“We don’t export products to aliens on Mars,” as one economist said to me.) The economy expands with a growing population, but most of all through an ever-expanding array of new products and experiences, which we consume at a faster and faster rate. The most important contributor to that faster pace of consumption is the decreasing lifespans of the things we buy.

A world without shopping, Cooper said, is still a consumer economy, but one grounded in quality rather than quantity, meaning products will be well made and designed for longer lifespans. Since better goods typically require more work and better materials to produce, prices will be considerably higher, making up for at least some of the lost earnings caused by the drop in the overall number of products sold. That also means that, in a deliberate transition to a market of fewer, better things, many more people would remain employed than is the case when consumption slows down in a severe recession. Meanwhile, a much larger part of a deconsumer economy would be driven by what happens during a long-lasting product’s lifetime, when it may require maintenance, repair or upgrading, or be rented, shared or resold. It would be a “radical, systemic change,” Cooper said. Could a deconsumer economy be the same size as a consumer economy? The answer to that question depends on human ingenuity, Cooper said. But he suspects that, at least initially, it would slow economic growth.

“What drives the throwaway culture? Well, often people want to have the newest and the latest,” Cooper said. “But there are people who want to have the oldest and the best.”

The idea that durability would be at the core of a lower-consuming culture dates back at least to 1982, when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development urged governments to promote longer product lifespans as a way to slow the avalanche of garbage piling up in the world’s landfills. Obviously enough, that didn’t happen. It was only as 2020 approached that Cooper saw action being taken on durability at the national level. In 2015, France made planned obsolescence illegal, defining the practice as the deliberate reduction of a product’s lifespan in order to increase its replacement rate, with steep fines and even jail time a possibility. When, in 2018, Sweden cut in half its sales tax on repairs, it was making a pioneering attempt to address carbon emissions by reducing consumption, rather than “greening” it. By 2021, the entire European Union was preparing to embed a “right to repair”—better access to the tools, parts and information needed to fix products—in its consumer policies, with a further goal to provide shoppers with labels indicating how long a product should last.

Durability is especially important to the sharing economy. Sharing goods was initially promoted as an action that reduced consumption by its very nature—common sense tells us that if people share, say, a car or an electric slow cooker, then each of them does not need to own one. The sharing economy proved to be much more complicated than that, most famously in the case of ride-hailing schemes, which, rather than inspiring people to reject car ownership, led many to take more trips using services like Uber and fewer by foot, bicycle or public transit. In many places, ride-hailing made traffic worse, not better. But durability affected sharing in an even more basic way: unless vehicles were specifically designed to wit...