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The problem is the price point. You can absolutely get products today that will last decades, but you'll have to pay more for them.
We've become a culture of instant gratification, and most people don't want to budget and save. They want that hit of dopamine right now.
What's unethical is the advertising industry making people believe that buying things makes you happy.
I've been wearing crocs since the beginning, so 20+ years, and I've never yet managed to wear a pair out. The only issue I've had was that the little croc logo button popped off one and was lost. I wrote to the company and they sent me a replacement button, free. I have I think four pairs in various colours; the most recent I got second-hand on Vinted. My sport involves launching and recovering boats in muddy water, so they're perfect summer footwear - hose them down and you're good to go. Also good as house shoes.
FWIW: "In 2025, Crocs revenue stood at $3.3 billion, an increase of 1.5% from the previous year."
Their flip flops, on the other hand.. I've had 3 break on me
This is why God designed knees the way he did. He secretly hates humans and wants us to have an expiration date.
Is it ethical for them to withhold performance to generate profit? CPUs and GPUs are limited in the range, to a certain large extent, by price discrimination.
It is unethical. If a company made a product so good it went bankrupt, there should be guardrails to ensure the workers and their families be rightfully compensated for their contribution to the better of society.
We're drowning in waste because of this mentality of selling things no matter what.
There should be incentives to make great things, there shouldn't be incentives to be a great stealer.
How would that work exactly? Where would the money for the workers and their families be coming from?
Yes, for a suitable value of "easily." It doesn't make sense to design every product to be as robust as possible, so there is a trade-off between robustness and other factors like cost and weight. A laptop or phone breaks easily if you drop it, but that doesn't mean the manufacturer is unethical for not making every single one be one of those super-rugged ones with rubber corners. As the ease of breakage increases, and as the cost of making it more robust decreases, so it becomes less and less justifiable to do.
The problem here is really uncertainty and lack of knowledge. If you knew that the product you were buying was going to last for exactly 17 months, you could compare the cost over its lifetime to one which would last exactly 25 months. Then all the underhanded tactics of planned obsolescence would be far less effective. But we don't know that, and really we don't even know the average or likely range.
Here's a canonical example. The East Germans made a drinking glass that didn't break. They produced 120 million of them. Then, capitalism happened and now we don't have unbreakable glasses any more.
Is it ethical for you as a consumer to buy low quality stuff that you know will break?
If the companies were required to produce something of a particular durability the average cost would be lower and more accessible to all stratas of society; your ethical argument comes from a place of significant privilege.
Your argument comes from a position of everything is someone else's fault you are powerless.
It may truly be the case for you. But most other people can make a difference for the better regardless of what the government or companies do.
But most times you don't know it the first time.
Hmm… never thought of that…
You may only have the power over your own purchase decisions, but hold on to what power you have.
Every company does it. It even has a name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
No, it isn't ethical.
I think that's a slightly different thing, albeit with a similar outcome depending on intent.
You can make "indestructible" versions of lots of things, but that doesn't mean they're remotely affordable or even desirable (due to weight or materials used).
A company deliberately making something bad so it breaks is what you're describing, but a company making something lower quality so it's cheaper isn't necessarily the same.
There are companies that went broke by making their product indestructible, a notable example being the maker of the wildly popular Instant Pot. They made a product that just didn't break. This is called planned obsolescence failure and has happened to other companies too.
That being said, making flimsy shit on purpose is shady at best.
This is why capitalism is stupid at its core. It doesn't promote anything good. It only promotes greed and enriching the top. Make the shittiest product you possibly can that people will buy, buy out every other maker of product, repopulate the sector with fake brands to give people illusion of choice.
Oldest trick in the book. And literally not 1 person I know can see through this trickery.
In capitalism making a long lasting good product is not viable at all, it makes no sense. Who gives a shit if your great grandkid is still using your oven 60 years later, the shareholders dont benefit then. Out of business. Its an idiotic system kept alive only by propaganda.
The real reason was private equity
Private equity made things a lot worse. In 2019, Instant Brands was acquired by Cornell Capital and unceremoniously merged with Corelle Brands, a housewares company that includes Pyrex. An acquisition by a private equity firm brings certain expectations with it—namely: lots and lots of fast growth.
The poor growth that private equity didn't find attractive could have been due to lack of repeat purchases tho.
But it means that the company was doing fine for decades.
The company that made instant pot actually went bankrupt because it was acquired by private equity via leveraged buyout.
What you're telling is the story the evil assholes that profit from that kind of thing want you to believe.
private equity could have slashed the product due to poor growth (due to ppl not buying repeatedly).
I agree it's what evil assholes want us to believe, but that doesn't necessarily make it a false claim.
Oh honey
I think it's okay to have different levels of quality at different price points so people can have options that fit their budget. A personal anecdote is measuring spoons. When I was young and just starting out, I just bought the cheapest set that would get the job done for a while. They were simply rounded plastic and the markings quickly started to wear off. Years later, when I was a bit more settled down, I decided to splurge on some nice stainless steel spoons in a rectangular shape that lets them fit inside spice jars better.
Think about all the waste that cheap products create. I can buy a cheap pair of work boots twice a year or a good pair every 2/3 years. I believe it's unethical for preying on the poor while also creating more waste.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
You should read about planned obsolescence.
I will
is this engagement bait? the phrasing of this question answers itself.
No, I genuinely don’t know how I feel about it for the reasons I outlined in the post above. I’m simply asking people for their views to get a clearer idea of the bigger picture. Plus, if you read all of the comments here, some people do make interesting points on why it could be considered ethical, like affordability for example, points that I never even thought of.
