Recently, a post-90s nurse was kicked out of her home for taking out an online loan. In order to pursue a refined life, she couldn't control her purchases and owed hundreds of thousands of online loans. With a monthly income of 8,000, she spent 30,000 to 40,000 per month.

Do you still remember the incident where Uniqlo was robbed some time ago? Yelling, pushing, tearing, mess everywhere! Kneel on the ground, fall into the crowd, and still want to grab it! Rob! Rob! Some people even got into a fight!

Do you still remember the boy who sold his kidney to buy an iPhone? It is reported that he has been severely traumatized both physically and mentally, and now has to rely on psychological counseling to survive.

The "Overall Operation of the Payment System in the First Quarter of 2019" released by the central bank shows: The total outstanding credit of credit cards that is overdue for six months reached 79.743 billion yuan; the balance of bank card credit payable was 6.98 trillion yuan, an increase from the previous quarter. 1.79.

According to data surveys, the average debt of those born in the 1990s has reached 18.5 times their monthly income. If calculated based on the average salary of 6,917 yuan, the average debt can be as high as 127,900 yuan.

Consumption is everywhere.

Unrestrained consumption leads to widespread disasters.

Why do we like to buy, buy, buy so much? Do you even hesitate to queue for days, rob like a zombie, fight like a shrew, and sell your kidneys like you're risking your life?

Who made this world become a world of unrestrained consumption? How do they do this?

Is it a marketing tool for merchants? Or advertising guidance? Or is it a herd mentality?

In fact, what is even scarier than this is the people behind these many factors who first change the product and then change us.

The real culprit dates back to the last century...

01

Planned scrapping, an open secret

1990s In the early 1990s, several pages of forgotten documents were discovered in an old Osram factory in East Berlin, England, which revealed an astonishing secret and served as a template for today's elimination-style consumption.

In the 1920s, manufacturers came up with the idea of ??artificially shortening the service life of products and deliberately designing products to be easily damaged, known as planned obsolescence.

Light bulbs in the 1920s

Planned obsolescence was first used in a very common product - the light bulb.

Several global monopoly companies signed an agreement and named the monopoly alliance Forbes. William Meinhardt, the then chairman of the Osram factory where the documents were discovered, was the initiator of this alliance.

In 1924, the light bulb obsolescence plan began to be implemented.

Several of the world's largest electrical appliance companies signed a secret agreement in Geneva to shorten the life of light bulbs from 2,500 hours to 1,000 hours, and any company that defaulted would be punished.

Forcibly shortening the service life of light bulbs by nearly half, in order for consumers to continue to buy new light bulbs, thereby increasing product sales, and manufacturers to make crazy profits.

It was not until the end of World War II that the Phoebus Alliance was disbanded.

Stephen Schreider, who studies the end-of-life properties of goods at the Technical University of Berlin, said: Planned end-of-life has long been an open secret in the industry, but many consumers don’t know it.

In addition to light bulbs, there are traces of "planned obsolescence" in the design of many products such as washing machines and electric toothbrushes.

The most obvious is the printer ink cartridge, which has a built-in counter that counts the number of sheets of paper printed by the cartridge, and will prompt that the ink is out, effectively counting down until it stops working.

In fact, consumers can reset the counter, clear the count to zero, and reuse it three times in this cycle. However, the manufacturer will not tell outsiders this secret, and consumers will not know it. Basically, it will be used once. Replaced with new ones.

This is the planned obsolescence of printer cartridges.

The subsequent impact of planned obsolescence is that new products are constantly being updated and iterated, and people are increasingly fond of consuming and discarding them. I always feel that new products are better than old ones.

The product you couldn’t put down yesterday may become garbage tomorrow.

California Scrap Recycling Depot

A scrap depot in California is filled with discarded electronic products.

Unlike other garbage dumps in the world, this place is also filled with many unopened electronic equipment products. The staff said that many businesses would rather destroy large quantities of unopened electronic equipment in order to continue to promote new models. It is an older model, but in fact there is no difference in the functional properties of the product. The purpose is to make consumers continue to buy new products without being selective.

02

Orderly creation of dissatisfaction

Shortly after the end of World War II, with the dissolution of the Forbes Alliance, the "planned obsolescence" implementation organization, many advertising directors And marketers realize that this method of controlling products to obtain high profits is unsustainable. One day the market will be saturated. How to stimulate people's consumption next?

In the mid-1950s, General Motors President Alfred P. Sloan proposed to start by changing people's consumer psychology. He hoped that consumers would buy new cars every year, just like buying new cars. New clothes as well as new shoes. GM calls this continuously updated theory: orderly creation of dissatisfaction.

1955 Chevrolet

The classic car released in 1955, the '56 Chevrolet Bel Air sports car, was sought after and snapped up by countless people at that time, both the upper class aristocrats and the middle class. Ordinary people in the lower class think that buying a new sports car represents the perfection of life and success in life.

The 1950s was a period of vigorous development for the American automobile industry. In 1955 alone, Chevrolet produced 1,713,478 cars, of which Bel Air accounted for 773,238.

The Chevrolet Bel Air is one of the masterpieces of design master Harry Earle and is known as the Cadillac at the price of Chevrolet. The Bel Air was a product line of Chevrolet from 1953 to 1975. This car was the first time since the establishment of the Chevrolet department in 1917 to adopt a completely new model, mainly with a two-color body.

The Bel Air of 1957 has undergone great changes compared with the previous models. In terms of appearance, it has changed into the style of the shark fin rocket car that became popular later.

1957 Chevrolet Stamp Edition

The body of this car is red and white, the rear is white, and the convertible's folding roof is also white, making people look at it. When looking at the rear of the car, it is easy to be affected by the same color and widen the field of vision. The short rear of the car is connected with the body and the large roof, visually changing the image of the short tail.

This kind of segmentation induction through the use of different colors, using the visual errors caused by people looking at objects, so that people can observe the body shape according to the designer's intention, is a technique often used by automobile designers.

It is precisely because of its beautiful appearance that the Bel Air, which has a large production volume, is still regarded as a treasure by car collectors around the world.

In fact, it only changed the color and model, but the performance and components did not change. Manufacturers constantly preach to consumers how good and high-end the new cars are. If you don't upgrade to a new model, you will be labeled as "backward".

The main purpose of the concept of orderly creation of dissatisfaction is to constantly instill in consumers that the products you have are outdated and too backward, and you must believe that the new ones are always better than the old ones.

From Forbes Alliance’s “planned obsolescence” to General Motors’ “orderly creation of dissatisfaction,” manufacturers have perfectly completed the transition from simply changing products to stimulate consumption to changing products combined with changing people’s psychology. The transition to stimulate consumption.

Soon, the "orderly creation of discontent" swept the Western world.

03

Struggle and counter-struggle against built-in obsolescence

The world’s largest consumption frenzy

In the past twelve years, we have witnessed All over the world, people's fanatical pursuit of a certain classic product - Apple.

In 2011, when Apple released new products in London, there was a crazy looting riot, which was called the world's largest consumption frenzy.

When Apple 5S was released, more than 3,000 people lined up in a small store. Many young people squatted on the streets in the biting cold wind before dawn, waiting. Some waited in line for several days but still didn't give up.

Waiting in line for 3 days just to buy a new mobile phone that is no different from the old one. Their answer is: they just don’t want to fall behind, Apple has become a part of life. Everyone is grabbing new models, and old models are no longer available.

In the United States, there are people waiting in line; in China it is even more terrifying.

Back then, in order to buy an Apple mobile phone, there were newcomers in the workplace who saved breakfast for several months, there were female college students who took out loans, and there were teenagers who sold their kidneys for money. cell phone.

What kind of magic does Apple have behind such an obsessive and fanatical pursuit?

In fact, the core charm of Apple is the concept of continuous elimination, continuous upgrading, and continuous updating, which is the concept of General Motors 50 years ago.

The person who took this concept to the extreme in consumerism was Apple's founder - Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs launched the first-generation iPhone in 2007. Since then, the iPhone has been updated seven times. The pressure on consumers to replace their mobile phones continues to increase with each press conference. Every time a new product appears, we feel that our original Apple mobile phones are outdated.

But to another extent, Apple is also admitting its limitations. It is no longer able to achieve technological innovation. You can only change the appearance of the phone.

“iPad’s Dirty Secret”

Many consumers believe that in addition to people’s frantic pursuit of new models, Apple prevents consumers from keeping products for long periods of time, even if they don’t want to replace them. Products can only be forced.

This is the built-in elimination attribute of the product.

On January 27, 2010, at Apple’s press conference held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the United States, the long-rumored first-generation iPad was unveiled. Subsequently, the iPad caused a stir around the world. tablet computer craze.

In 2010, tablet computer sales in China were 1.74 million units.

In 2015, the global tablet market exceeded US$49 billion.

However, just when the iPad was in full swing in consumer markets around the world, a publicity campaign called "iPad's Dirty Secrets" suddenly started...

It turned out that a bunch of New Yorkers After my brother bought an iPad, he discovered that the battery life of the iPad's dedicated battery did not exceed 18 months. Coincidentally, the warranty period was not 18 months. When they called Apple's after-sales hotline, they were told they needed to pay a $255 repair fee or they would have to replace it with a new one. At that time, the price of a new iPad was US$400. Regardless of whether it was repaired or replaced, an electronic product would be useless after only 18 months of use. After thinking about it, the brothers felt that they had been cheated, so they launched this project. A “iPad’s Dirty Secret” campaign.

They also made a short film called "iPad's Irreplaceable Battery", which reached more than 5 million views in two weeks and attracted mainstream media coverage.

Although Apple did not respond directly, it immediately changed its strategy.

With the exposure of this movement, a fight against the obsolete attributes of built-in products has also begun in California...

Kyle Waynes, anti-commodity built-in One of the leaders in the fight to eliminate attributes. He runs a plugging website called "Fix It Yourself" that specializes in plugging in new electronics and figuring out how to repair them.

They found a new type of screw on the iPhone 4 that they had never seen before, saying that it was specially invented by Apple to prevent people like them from disassembling it because they did not want consumers to replace it with other batteries. Later, Kyle used reverse thinking to crack the screw and successfully replaced it.

Kyle believes that manufacturers are making products thinner and thinner in order to make the products difficult to repair, which means they can only be replaced with new ones, thus stimulating consumption.

04

At the end, the theory of market freedom

In my opinion, in the case of Apple, manufacturers and consumers seem to be on the same side.

Even though Apple made its mobile phone thinner, many people still lined up to grab it. So Apple made its phone thinner and thinner, and consumers became more and more crazy about it.

The result is that there is no way to repair it. The thinner the volume, the more functions it has to carry. That is, the device becomes more and more specialized and non-repairable.

With constant upgrading and the unbridled purchase of new products, the disposable consumption culture has spread.

According to statistics, from the 1890s to the early 20th century, each person bought 67 pieces of clothing every year, and on average they bought a new piece of clothing every four or five days.

Can you estimate how many lipsticks you have purchased in a year? How many bags? How many pieces of clothing? How many pairs of shoes? How many times have you bought them and used them? Let’s estimate how many mobile phones have been replaced in five years? How many cars have you changed in ten years?

We keep buying and buying, not because the products we own have lost their functionality, but because we feel that they have passed the fashion period. To be more precise, the manufacturers make us feel that they have passed the fashion period. As a result, everyone feels that the epidemic period has passed.

Fashion periods are getting shorter and new products are becoming more popular.

The core essence of consumerism is that people always feel that new products are better than the products they own because they desire to be better. Even if you can't afford it, you still have to use credit cards, Huabei, Jiebei, online loans, etc. to buy it.

Therefore, uncontrolled consumption is becoming more and more common. It was born in the last century and is becoming popular today.

However, from the perspective of free consumer market theory, both merchants and consumers have the right to independently produce and consume goods. Manufacturers continue to improve the quality of goods to meet consumer needs, giving consumers With the supreme status, they have the right to live the life they want and buy the things they want.

Economic development needs to be driven by market freedom, and market freedom needs to be supported by consumption freedom.

Therefore, those behaviors that change products and then change people’s psychology to stimulate consumption not only give birth to a culture of continuous consumption, advanced consumption, transitional consumption, and uncontrolled consumption, but also drive the progress and development of the economic market. develop.