Our economic structure is meant to dictate the market, so that companies are forced to make quality products to stay in business lest their competitors would make something better, safer, longer-lasting, more reliable, taking the larger share of the market and forcing the sub-par product making businesses out of existence.
What actually happens—Companies compete for who can make the least expensive, passable product, using the guidelines of—“Can the average person afford this, understand this, does it play to the ignorant masses, will it last long enough but not so long that our future products don’t sell, can we get away with it, what’s the risk to reward ratio? Our market doesn’t ensure that our consumables are better. Better, safer, healthier, more reliable, intelligent, these are luxury items. The standard model of everything is “profitable” and “marketable.” These are the core values of the corporation of society.
We don’t ask what the best quality product is, we ask what’s the best quality product I can afford. Luckily, there’s enough advertising for most of it to convince enough of us that we are happy with what we are able to get, and we are pacified like babies with brand name binkies.
Listen to me read this post with bonus content on the Thought and Other Absurdities Podcast below and most other places you find podcasts.
Joseph D. Newcomer 
The story of civilization: The powers that be doing what they can to pacify the masses…from religion, to war, to nationalism, and now blind consumerism
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and sugar and booze and the terrible news. We are permanently distracted.
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That is the sad truth. We get what we can afford and that’s the secret to consumerism and relentless marketing. I think many spend themselves to death and buy their way to hell. Not a pacifying binkie at all. Nice subject, Joseph. 🙂
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This is SO true! My eyes were opened to this whole market-pacifier concept a few years back when I read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Shell. Boy, were my eyes opened. It totally changed my shopping habits!
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That sounds interesting. I’ll have to look that one up.
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We are all remembering fondly of having something, ten or more years and it is still working. It didn’t have to go this way, but it did. We should all haunt second-hand stores for quality items that can be refinished and updated. If we did not buy that new cheap stuff, the powers that be would have to change. But, alas, that will not happen. I still do it, but I am a tiny minority.
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It’s unavoidable in the current zeigeist.
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I’ve learned to distrust a name brand 👀
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Even when a brand is seemingly ethical, the paradox of profit should make everyone question all motives.
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It was an American economist
who first come up with the concept
of obsolescence as a means for
keeping the wheels of industry
spinning at a profitable maximum.
The Chinese then turned planned
obsolescence into an art form.
Many decades later, another
American ivy league economist
came up with the idea of
supercharging usery by means
of a credit card, arguing that the
indebtedness of the poor is the
the way of the future for making
the rich richer. The rest is Pay Day
lending history.
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So perfectly disgusting.
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