The Annual Model Change
Manufacture the feeling of being out of date each year, rather than any change in performance. This was the repurchase invention Alfred Sloan of GM refined. GM's annual report for 1923 already carries a somewhat apologetic note about the practice, so it was clearly running by then. The form was set in 1927: after the previous year's LaSalle drew acclaim for its styling, GM approved on 23 June the creation of an Art and Colour Section, with Harley Earl at its head. A car company now had a department for nothing but how the car looked. It is an invention with a large credit and a large debit. In the late 1960s Volkswagen mocked the practice in its advertising, and even the trade press was arguing it should stop. On the other hand, redesigning every year did widen choice and employment, and improvements in performance and safety were happening alongside. This map does not settle it.
The myth, corrected
«Planned obsolescence» was coined to describe companies deliberately building things to break
The original meaning was close to the opposite. The phrase first appears in a pamphlet published by Bernard London in 1932. London was a real-estate broker who believed one cause of the Depression was that people kept cars, tyres, radios and clothes far longer than the statistics assumed — and proposed that the government should fix a legal lifespan for every article, require disposal when it expired, and penalise consumers who did not comply. It was not an accusation against manufacturers; it was a policy proposal for the state. The modern meaning was spread by Vance Packard's The Waste Makers (1960).