The pedestrian border crossing at the southern end of North Morley Avenue is the busiest point in sleepy downtown Nogales, Arizona. I watch a mother and her young daughter carry two small duffel bags through the TO MEXICO gate. Thirty seconds later, a gnarled old man in jeans and a denim shirt returns from Mexico carrying nothing.
Most of the buildings along Morley are two stories, and none look as if they were built recently. There’s a duty-free shop, a perfumery, some ATMs, and a few old department stores converted into dollar stores catering to border traffic. I stop into a store with stacks of knockoff Levi’s in the windows and wander aisles of low-cost, low-quality China-made tchotchkes, clothing, and even snack foods.
Goodwill is located a few blocks north, precisely at the point where the town’s commerce begins to fade. It occupies a single-story building at one end of a parking lot bordered by a half-empty strip mall and a Pep Boys automobile-parts shop and service center. Inside is a smaller and slower version of the Outlet Center sixty-five miles north on Irvington Road. At nine forty A.M., six customers slowly rummage through thirty-two carts, piled mostly with clothes. Nobody seems to be in a hurry; competition, if it exists, is taking the day off.
I wander the store, stopping in a corner where two carts are filled with Goodwill donations that didn’t sell and will soon be landfill-bound. Among other items, I count three bowling balls, an empty Miracle-Gro sprayer, a cracked child’s booster seat, a no-brand vacuum cleaner, a TurboTax 2005 box, a beat-up briefcase, a rolled-up rug, and many, many sport water bottles with fitness club logos written across them.
Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the store, the Thursday auction is about to begin. Three employees stand by with clipboards, chatting in Spanish with three middle-aged women. These are the regular attendees, and—according to Lupita Ramos, the store manager—they buy a lot for their Mexican customers across the border. Their male partners stand off to the side, hands in jean pockets, smiling sheepishly at one another beneath cowboy and baseball hats.
The first auction lots are a dozen washing-machine-size boxes of unsold hard goods, including toys, plastic pitchers, old appliances, and binders. The bidding starts at twenty dollars and moves up in one-dollar increments. Most boxes fetch winning bids between twenty-five and thirty dollars. Two don’t sell at all. I peek into one of the unsold ones: at the top is a Black and Decker bread maker and three bowling balls.
Next, the auction shifts to carts piled with used child car seats. Those get my attention. Like many parents, I am familiar with the alleged hazards associated with used and expired child safety seats; they’re an angry staple of online parenting forums. The manufacturers of car seats aren’t shy about promoting the idea that older seats are a hazard that should be kept from the secondhand markets. For example, Graco, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of child safety seats, explains on its website that “used or expired car seats can be dangerous, especially if you don’t know the car seat’s history.” So Graco’s website recommends the following:
To help ensure a car seat won’t be used after expiration, it is a good idea to remove the cover, cut or remove the harness straps, write on it with a sharpie, and place it into a black garbage bag before taking it to be recycled or disposed of.
The practical effect of advice like this is to terrify parents into destroying used, unexpired car seats for fear that they’ll become tools of death in the hands of less-thoughtful parents. Retailers, keen to sell more car seats, perpetuate the message. For example, as recently as October 2018, Target offered this warning in stores and online: “Used car seats shouldn’t be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and regulations change constantly.” That message makes its way into thrift stores. When I asked a Goodwill donation door employee whether Goodwill accepts used car seats, he responded, “No, because people will accuse us of killing their kids.”
It’s a colorful answer, but it’s not entirely accurate. Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona accepts used car seats as donations but won’t sell them in Tucson-area stores. Instead, they’re either shipped to Nogales, where they’re put up for auction, or sold online—but only if they haven’t expired. In Nogales they’re purchased by Mexican secondhand traders, who take them over the border. Mexican families who can’t afford new can take advantage of the cut-rate pricing to protect their children.
This seems like a situation that benefits parties on both sides of the border. But as a parent conditioned by endless warnings about used and expired car seats, I must concede I was wary when I saw those used car seats waiting to be auctioned. Is it actually safe to use a used car seat? Is it even legal?
To find out, I contacted the United States Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the U.S. government agency that regulates child safety seats, to obtain a list of rules and regulations relating to expiration dates on child safety seats. A spokesperson wrote back: “There are no actual rules or regulations in the U.S. about using an expired date car seat.”
Of course, the U.S. government isn’t oblivious to the possibility that a child safety seat could degrade over time. Its voluminous rules for regulating and testing child restraint systemsa includes detailed protocols for testing whether the seatbelts included with a child safety seat are able to withstand long-term exposure to sunlight, abrasion, and microorganisms (the belts are the only parts of a child safety seat that must be tested for durability, according to the regulations). If the seatbelts don’t pass, they aren’t installed. Period. There are no expirations.
Notably, those durability tests are the same ones the U.S. government requires of automobile safety belts worn by older children and adults.b They’re also tested on a pass/fail basis. That makes sense—who wants a car with seatbelts that expire?—but it also raises an awkward question. What accounts for the expiration dates on child safety seats and the maniacal fears about used ones?
To find out, I sent a four-question questionnaire to ten of the world’s biggest child safety seat manufacturers. In it, I asked the process by which they determine the safe lifespan of a safety seat, whether materials manufacturers (such as the companies responsible for the plastics) are consulted, whether the manufacturers rely on any data or studies to determine expiration dates, and when expirations were first attached to seats.
Only two companies responded. Graco emailed to recommend that a car seat be replaced after the “useful life date” and sent me a link to public information on its website about car seat expirations. That was no help. Britax wrote back with information that answered questions I didn’t ask (“Car seat lifespans have increased since the 1990s because vehicle windows are now more advanced and … lessen a car seat’s direct contact with UV rays”), or didn’t answer them at all. For example, here’s the third question from my questionnaire and Britax’s response:
Has Britax conducted any studies on aged car seats that have influenced the determination of lifespan? Could it share those studies?
• Britax declines to comment.
Enter the Minneapolis-based Target, a major vendor of child safety seats. For years, it has run a campaign in which consumers are given store credit for recycling their used and expired seats at Target stores (Target then destroys the seats so that they won’t enter the secondhand market). In part, Target frames the trade-ins as an initiative to protect children. And since the program started in 2016, Target claims it’s recycled more than 500,000 used seats.
As I’ve already noted, as recently as October 2018, Target’s trade-in website claimed, “Used car seats shouldn’t be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and regulations change constantly.” When I reached out to Target to ask if the company could provide a source for that claim (because the manufacturers wouldn’t), a company spokeswoman replied by referring me to a car-seat-industry-sponsored website: Car-Safety.org.c Within hours of that email, Target changed the language on its website to read: “According to car-safety.org, car seats expire every six years …”
I figured that a major, publicly held company like Target wouldn’t lie to a reporter about something that could easily be verified. I also figured that Car-Safety.org would have links to studies showing, for example, increased risk between a used car seat and a new one. But I was wrong! Target’s new language was nowhere to be found on the Car-Safety.org site. In fact, there wasn’t anything close. So I wrote back to Target and told the company so. Hours later, its website language changed again, this time to read: “According to car-safety.org, many manufacturers recommend that car seats expire around the six-year mark.” That’s a grammatically suspect way of accurately conveying what the site actually says: “Six (6) years is the general recommendation.” But anyone trying to locate data supporting that recommendation will be disappointed. Car-Safety.org—like the manufacturers who support it—just makes unsubstantiated claims.
Is Target purposely conveying false and unverifiable information to parents? I’m fairly certain the reason Target is so cavalier with its language surrounding car seats is that the company—like many parents—simply assumes data exists to substantiate the expirations that manufacturers print on car seats. Of course that assumption is lucrative, insofar as it helps promote the sale of more car seats at Target. Company management, with conventional wisdom on its side, isn’t likely to concede it’s wrong.
But I believe in giving the benefit of the doubt.
So I went back to Target to ask if it could offer another source for its claims about the dangers of used and expired car seats. The Target spokeswoman, clearly irritated to hear from me again, suggested that I read a Consumer Reports article.1 I did, but that didn’t answer my questions either. Rather than further aggravate Target—which didn’t appear interested in a serious discussion about misleading marketing practices—I reached out to Consumer Reports to see if they had any data substantiating car seat expirations. They never responded.
And then I happened upon Sweden.
Since 2008, the Scandinavian country has managed to halve its highway fatality rate, and it even has a program to eliminate highway fatalities entirely by 2050. To help achieve that goal, Sweden has some of the best and strictest child safety seat laws in the world. And they’ve paid off: child auto fatalities have been reduced to almost zero. It’s no exaggeration, and probably an understatement, to claim that Sweden is the global auto- and road-safety gold standard.
I figured that if anybody could give me an honest, data-driven answer to the question of whether used and expired child safety seats are dangerous, it would be a Swedish regulator. So I contacted Maria Krafft, the director of traffic safety and sustainability at the Swedish Transport Administration, who years ago had blogged in favor of used car seats and where to buy good ones in Stockholm.2 Krafft referred me to Professor Anders Kullgren of the Karolinska Institutet and the Chalmers University of Technology, as well as the longtime head of traffic safety research at Folksam, one of Sweden’s largest insurers. Like auto insurers everywhere, Folksam has a financial self-interest in ensuring that passengers are safe (danger equates to payouts and financial losses). In fact, during the early 1990s, Folksam manufactured its own line of child safety seats. If used car seats are a hazard, Professor Kullgren would know. He shared his thoughts via email:
We have the same experience in Sweden. Manufacturers of child restraints (and other safety equipment such as bicycle and motorcycle helmets) tell their customers to buy a new product after a certain period of time, often relatively short.
We can’t see any evidence to justify that from what we have seen in real-world crashes.
The email continued, touching on Folksam’s past as a seat manufacturer:
We still have some seats stored at Folksam that have been used. We have not seen any changes or problems with the plastic material in those seats for this 20–30 year period of time.
That’s not data, but it’s more than what the world’s biggest car seat manufacturers and Target are willing or able to reveal.
Professor Kullgren concluded by writing that Folksam’s recommendation is that so long as a seat hasn’t been in a crash or otherwise doesn’t exhibit any damage, it’s fine to use. He also noted that seat designs are always improving, so a consumer buying a newer seat is likely getting a safer seat—especially if the old one exceeds ten years in age. But there’s nothing illegal or unsafe in using an older one.
Kullgren’s email wouldn’t have shocked any of the bidders at the Goodwill car seat auction. Roughly fifty seats were up for sale, and all but three sold, all in a matter of minutes. Prices ranged from five to thirty dollars. As the seats disappeared, one of the bidders asked a Goodwill employee when the next ones would arrive. Thinking back on the auction, I think it’s too bad that Target recycled those more than 500,000 seats over the years. They would’ve sold, and many children south of the border would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand market.
Since the dawn of the mass market, product manufacturers and retailers have been sensitive to the lifespans of their products. Some of that concern is in the interests of both consumers and manufacturers. For example, an expiration date on a can of soup protects consumers from eating spoiled food—and manufacturers from responsibility if the consumer becomes sick from eating spoiled food. And some of it is in the interest only of the manufacturers. In 1924, the world’s largest lighting manufacturers formed a cartel that agreed to reduce the lifespan of lightbulbs as a means of boosting sales.3
In most cases, product lifespans tend to be utilized as negatives that encourage or require the purchase of more stuff. Your packaged cookies perished, and your aspirin expired: go buy more. Lifespan can also be engineered to drive sales. For example, the usable lifespan of a smartphone or tablet computer is often limited to its useful battery life. Apple is good at this. In 2017, the world’s most valuable company admitted that it had secretly slowed older iPhones (via a software patch) as their batteries aged and depleted. Public outrage forced the company to apologize and explain that it had merely been trying to maintain iPhone battery performance. In France, at least, law enforcement had doubts about the excuse and initiated an investigation into whether Apple had violated the country’s “planned obsolescence” law, under which it’s illegal for a company to deliberately shorten the life of its products.
The French (so far) have not prosecuted Apple or anyone else for “committing” planned obsolescence. That’s wise. Planned obsolescence is too much a part of consumer culture to be eradicated by law enforcement. Indeed, it’s a venerable tradition. In 1955, Harley Earl, the first designated head of design at General Motors (and arguably one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century), explained that his designs weren’t intended to be timeless:
Our big job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years: now [1955] it is 2 years. When it is 1 year, we will have a perfect score.4
Earl was mostly successful. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, abandoned cars became one of the most public and pressing environmental problems in the United States, worthy of mention and action by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.5 But Earl also seemed to underestimate the quality of his own artistry, and a consuming public’s desire to own something timeless (as well as something new and disposable). The Chevrolet Corvette, a car model imagined by Earl, remains one of the world’s most collectible vehicles. In 2013, one of Earl’s own Corvettes sold at auction for $925,000. Presumably, the bidder didn’t consider it obsolete.
It’s not just wealthy car collectors who seek timeless products. Average consumers are just as hungry. In 2016, European researchers presented 2,917 European shoppers with a choice of products labeled with different expected useful lifespans.6 In an era of fast fashion, Ikea furniture, and disposable glow sticks, the conclusions were surprising: on average, sales of products whose lifespan was labeled and was longer than the competition’s increased by 13.8 percent—irrespective of price.
Some product categories did better than others. Lifespan labeling made virtually no difference in television purchase decisions, while it contributed to a 23.7 percent boost in suitcase sales, a 20.1 percent increase in printer sales, and a 15 percent increase in athletic shoe sales. But the most illuminating findings related to the money that consumers claimed they were willing to spend for a longer product lifespan. For example, when presented with dishwasher options, 90 percent of those surveyed said they were willing to pay an average of €102 ($115) more for a dishwasher priced between €300 and €500 ($340 and $567) if the product lifespan would be two years greater than the competition’s.
These are jarring findings, if only because most consumers, marketing analysts, economists, and businesses journalists are focused almost exclusively on the production, marketing, and sales of new goods. But spend even a few minutes in a thrift shop, or at the fabric markets of Cotonou, and it’s obvious that consumers instinctively value durability—and vendors price it in—over limited-use products like Ikea furniture and fast fashion. They know their long-term interests aren’t served by purchasing the short-term reward; given the opportunity, they want to spend more to spend less.
In September 2017, I traveled to Chicago for Poshfest, the annual two-day conference organized by Poshmark, a fast-growing online marketplace where roughly three million individuals buy and sell clothes from one another. There are hundreds of attendees, most of whom earn income by selling on Poshmark (several told me they earn in excess of one hundred thousand dollars per year doing so). When I asked sellers the brands most sought by their customers, the names were uniformly high-quality (and expensive): Lululemon Athletica, Santana Canada, the North Face, among others. These claims aren’t just the subjective impressions of individual vendors, either. According to Poshmark’s own metrics, Lululemon Athletica was—in September 2017—Poshmark’s bestselling women’s apparel brand (making it the bestselling brand on the site), and it’s remained stubbornly near or at the top of the rankings ever since. When I asked Priscilla Romero, a Colorado-based Poshmark seller who has listings for hundreds of items on the app, why secondhand Lululemon is so popular, she looked at me with pity: “It lasts.” Cheap athletic wear simply wouldn’t be as collectible.
When I contacted Lululemon to ask whether secondhand contributes to their retail pricing decisions, they declined to comment. Fortunately, other companies are open to discussing the possibility.
In 2011, Patagonia, the maker and retailer of high-end, sustainable outdoor clothing, began an initiative to collect and resell used Patagonia garments (first on eBay, subsequently via Patagonia’s own stores and website) that the company wants to see total 10 percent of overall sales by 2023.
I spoke by telephone to Phil Graves, Patagonia’s director of corporate development, about the impact of used Patagonia products—the company has branded it “Worn Wear”—on sales of new Patagonia. He told me that the two markets are independent—so far. But long term, the resale market probably boosts the potential market for Patagonia’s expensive new stuff. “A lot of used customers are new customers to Patagonia,” he explained. “They like the message—organic materials—but maybe they lack the means to buy it. So lower prices are a way in.”
For now, Patagonia’s new sales are far greater than its secondhand ones. But if Patagonia items are as valuable and durable as Graves suggests, the ratio should start to shift (as it has with refurbished smartphones, which now constitute the fastest growing segment of the global smartphone market). If and when it does, Patagonia’s secondhand market will resemble a much smaller version of the world’s biggest and most valuable secondhand market: that for used cars.
Sustainably minded consumers don’t often think of motorized vehicles as sustainable models of anything. But perhaps they should: in 2018, Americans bought 17.3 million new cars, and 41 million used ones. That’s not an anomaly, either. In developed economies like the United States and the European Union, used-car sales tend to be two to two and a half times greater than new. And as short-term leasing of cars becomes increasingly popular (around one third of all new car production is leased), the size of the secondhand market expands as more cars go off-lease. That, in turn, makes high-quality, recent-model cars available to more people. And it’s all happening at a time when demand for automobiles is increasing rapidly, especially in emerging Asia and Africa.
It’s a little bit like Patagonia, when you think about it. Prospective car buyers can access a favorite brand for less (Patagonia gives store credit for trade-ins of old clothes—just like a car dealer does for old cars), and they can do so at the same store the new stuff is sold. Only, in the case of cars, it’s called a dealership. And nothing markets a new product’s durability quite like a robust secondhand market for the old ones.
For nearly as long as there have been new car models, consumers have been looking for ways to value that reliability. Systematic help arrived in 1926, when a Los Angeles entrepreneur named Les Kelley published the first Blue Book, a guide to the value of new and used automobiles that’s grown into a global institution. From the beginning, Kelley saw the value in providing a new car’s projected resale value. Kelley explains its reasoning on the company website:
Why is resale value so important? Because you probably aren’t going to drive your car all the way to the scrap heap. And whether you tend to keep cars for three years or 10, your total ownership cost is going to be impacted by the amount of money you recoup when you sell it.
Total cost of ownership is so critical to Kelley that it hands out annual “Best Resale Value Awards” that car companies use in marketing their new cars. And why not? Here’s Kelley’s rationale for giving Toyota its 2018 “Best Brand” award:
Durability and reliability are especially important to used car buyers, and Toyota’s sterling reputation blankets its wide range of cars, trucks and SUVs (and a minivan). If you want to spend less on a new car, buy one that will be worth more when you sell it as a used car. When you buy a Toyota—any Toyota—that’s what you get.
In other words: spend more to spend less. Unlike product expiration dates, this is a positive message about product lifespan that reframes the consumer experience as an investment rather than a short-term act of consumption. In many respects, it’s the unspoken rationale that drove European customers to say that they’d spend more on a dishwasher.
Of course, investment isn’t available to everyone. The potential buyer of a $13,000 Chevrolet Spark subcompact likely bases the purchase decision on different criteria than the potential buyer of a $50,000 Volvo S90 station wagon. But thanks to the Kelley Blue Book, someone with the budget for a $12,000 Nissan Versa can assess a much wider variety of models based on the overall cost of ownership. For example, as of 2019, a six-year-old plug-in electric hybrid Chevy Volt is typically 60 percent less than a new one (in fact, it’s right around the price of a new Chevrolet Spark)—and the high-quality electric vehicle is likely to last much longer than a car of similar vintage built around an internal combustion engine.
Can that used-car experience be replicated in other products? Realistically, most of the objects cluttering modern homes are too cheap to inspire secondhand markets. There will be no disposable glow stick section at Goodwill, no eBay category devoted to cheap plastic picture frames or broken no-name feature phones. But as nearly three thousand European consumers demonstrated in 2016, the desire to invest in stuff, rather than just consume stuff, runs in parallel with a decades-long boom in low-cost, low-quality goods.
People have been saying “they don’t make ’em like they used to” for as long as somebody else—somebody other than an immediate family member or neighbor—has been making stuff.
They aren’t wrong, either. Global clothing utilization—a metric measuring the total number of times a garment has been worn, even after resale—declined by 36 percent between 2002 and 2016.7 Notably, the biggest declines didn’t come in wealthy economies, but rather in Asia’s emerging economies. In China, the average number of wears dropped from two hundred to sixty-two (fewer than in wealthy Europe).
Some of the decline can be attributed to the speed of fashion and its globalization. But not all. Garments with little to no exposure to the currents of fashion aren’t worn as much, either. For example, global hosiery utilization dropped by roughly 40 percent, and nightwear utilization by more than half. In other words, you probably aren’t imagining it if—like me—your socks have more holes these days.
Likewise, you also aren’t imagining things if your washing machine breaks more often than the one your grandparents had. A 2015 study commissioned by the German Environmental Agency found that—between 2004 and 2012—the proportion of purchases of electronic appliances replaced because of defects grew from 3.5 to 8.3 percent.8 Similarly, the share of large household appliances (like refrigerators and washing machines) that had to be replaced within five years of purchase grew from 7 to 13 percent. If those numbers don’t seem large, think of them in terms of a single manufacturer. What would the consuming public think—much less say in online reviews—about a washing machine manufacturer whose five-year failure rate increased from single to double digits in the span of eight years?
Consumers know what’s happening. In 2014, a British nongovernmental organization that works with business, government, and communities released data showing how badly manufacturers of household appliances are doing when it comes to meeting consumer expectations.9 For example, British consumers expected washing machines to last a minimum of six years. But according to survey data, a whopping 41 percent of washers purchased in 2012 replaced products less than six years old, and 82 percent of surveyed respondents claimed that the replacement was due to a breakdown or an unreliability. Refrigerators and vacuum cleaners performed even worse.
Not all—or even most—of the quality problems can be blamed on the manufacturers. Price is king for most consumers, and manufacturers are always seeking ways to lower costs so that they can meet that demand. Sometimes meeting the demand means cutting corners, as consumers of fast fashion learn when they fish out their faded garments from the laundry. But not always. The first Motorola cellphone handsets cost nine thousand dollars in the 1980s, and they didn’t include cameras, GPS, voice recognition, or other features that smartphone consumers expect in phones that cost two hundred dollars. The pressure to innovate is sometimes the best cost-cutting incentive of all.
To reach the testing lab for the world’s largest maker of commercial laundry machines, you need to travel to central Wisconsin and descend a stairway into a basement that smells like soap. Around a corner and then another is a room that looks like a laundromat evacuated by chemists. There are dozens if not hundreds of machines here; they all appear to be running, but the only people watching after them wear white lab coats.
I am here with Randy Radtke, global public relations manager, and Tom Friederick, supervisor of quick response engineering, at Alliance Laundry Systems. Every year the century-old company sells millions of washers and dryers to customers as diverse as hotels, laundromats, hospitals, militaries, college dormitories, industrial laundries, restaurants, and—increasingly—home-owners. Most of that equipment is made by 1,600 manufacturing employees here in Ripon, population 7,500.
The entry-level Speed Queen TR3 doesn’t look like a trendsetter, but it sells like one. (Image courtesy of Alliance Laundry Systems)
We pause in front of a Speed Queen–branded top-loading washer, Alliance’s brand for the consumer and coin-operated laundry market. It doesn’t come cheap. By the company’s own estimates, it’s roughly three hundred dollars more expensive than what the competition puts out—or roughly a thousand dollars for an entry-level washing machine. For that price, it certainly doesn’t look like anything special. The model I’m gazing at is a steel box painted white with three knobs—for water temperature, load size, and cycle type. If anything, it reminds me of the ancient, unkillable washer-dryer set that ran for decades in the basement of my grandparents’ home.
“We run it nonstop for a year,” Friederick says, and opens the lid to show me water swishing around. “They’re not all prototypes. Sometimes we’re auditing one of our own machines to ensure we’re keeping up standards. Sometimes we’re prototyping a single part. It varies.” Nearby, a machine is running with a green piece of tape affixed to the control panel. Someone has scrawled across it: NOISEY/MED. SPIN.
“What’s that mean?”
“Might be an older machine with prototype parts in it.”
In the testing lab, they go to extreme lengths. “We’ll put hockey pucks in the dryers,” Friederick tells me. “When they come out, they look like charcoal briquettes.” Sure enough, I hear a chorus of thumps in the dryer testing area. Then we turn a corner and encounter something louder: every four seconds, a mechanical arm opens and slams the doors of a washer-dryer combo. According to a mounted counter, I witness slam 54,472. Elsewhere I see a washing machine that’s been running for 9,861 hours and another that’s logged 3,180 cycles. At the far end of the room is a box where valves used to mix water inside a washing machine are on cycle 206,261.
“We also test the coin boxes for the laundromats,” Friederick says. “Beat them up pretty good to simulate somebody trying to break into them.”
“Can I see that?”
He laughs.
But there’s a more meaningful point to be made about those coin-operated machines. Next door are manufacturing operations that sprawl over several city blocks. I’m given a tour that includes the brightly lit line where hundreds of workers assemble around 1,400 smaller dryers per day (elsewhere are assembly operations for bigger dryers, including some almost as big as my rental car). The devices look mostly identical on the line, but when we reach the inspection area at the end, I notice a crucial distinction: some have laundromat coin boxes and some don’t. “There’s no difference in how things are made here,” Radtke explains, raising his voice over the factory din. “Machines for consumers and machines for business are made on the same lines.”
That isn’t just a way to save money on space and manufacturing costs. It reflects a philosophy of design. The idea is simple: upfront costs are less important than the long-term cost of ownership. A laundromat washing machine, subjected to all kinds of abuse, is bought to last. One that isn’t will inevitably break down and fail to generate business.
It’s a point that Mike Schoeb, Alliance Laundry Systems’ CEO, makes during a video conference with me from the company’s headquarters in Miami. “It’s about total cost of ownership,” he explains. “Service calls are really expensive. So the design criteria we use is not ‘first cost,’ ” he says, referring to the sticker price. “That’s important, but depending on the year of the survey, it’s the number three, number five criteria for our [commercial] customers.”
The consumer market behaves differently. First cost tends to be the most important factor to people browsing through the appliance sections at Best Buy and Lowe’s. So rather than design for the durability valued by business, most consumer appliance manufacturers will work on finding a way to ensure an attractive sticker price.
After the tour, I sit at a long table in an airy conference room off the lobby of Alliance Laundry Systems’ sleek new offices (next to the factory) in Ripon. Jay McDonald, the company vice president in charge of home laundry sales in the United States, and Susan Miller, the Speed Queen brand manager for North America, join me. Both are salespeople, and they press the sale immediately, bringing up Speed Queen’s strongest selling point: “Built to Last 25 Years.” The message is plastered on the machines, on the brand’s website, in its brochures, and—increasingly—on review and social media forums where fans of the Speed Queen brand brag about their machines. “It’s not something you can just go out and say,” McDonald tells me. “ ‘Twenty-five years.’ You have to prove it.”
The sad thing is, decades ago you didn’t have to prove it. Take, for example, Maytag, the venerable U.S. home appliance brand (now owned by Whirlpool). In 1967, the company ran its first television advertisement featuring Ol’ Lonely, a Maytag repairman who spends his time alone, waiting for service calls that never come. In that ad, Ol’ Lonely summarizes what he symbolizes: “Maytag washers and dryers are built to last. That makes a Maytag repairman the loneliest guy in town.” Appliances were pricey and expected to last. Consumers wanted reassurance, and Ol’ Lonely conveyed it so convincingly that he’s one of the most iconic characters in the history of American advertising.
Then, around the mid-1990s, consumer and manufacturer expectations began to shift. Low-cost factories in Asia emerged that were capable of building appliances for less than, say, Maytag factories in North America. To remain competitive, manufacturers who remained in high-wage countries like the United States lowered prices. That discounting didn’t come for free. It often took its toll in quality: metal parts gave way to less durable plastic ones; sheet metal became thinner, less durable, and more capable of projecting noise. Still, consumers sort of won. Since the mid-1990s, prices on all major home appliances have declined, becoming an ever-smaller part of the overall budgets of people around the world.
But declining quality eventually catches up with manufacturers and their customers. In the early 2000s, Maytag faced growing numbers of complaints and class-action lawsuits over quality problems. It wasn’t making much of an effort to solve the problems, either. Instead, it was introducing new, low-cost, and low-quality models. Dependability, the essence of the Ol’ Lonely character, was no longer the most compelling reason to buy a Maytag.
Suddenly, Ol’ Lonely didn’t really have a place in Maytag’s advertising. To help him work through the crisis, Maytag hired a marketing consultant who advised the company to embrace the notion that “the most innovative new technologies are not completely dependable.”10 The televised advertisements that followed this reinvention featured Ol’ Lonely paired with a younger, more energetic apprentice who spends his time trying to figure out how to outsmart the machine’s many new innovations—and in the process, annoying his boss. The apprentice didn’t last very long.
Around the time that Maytag was reengineering Ol’ Lonely, Alliance Laundry Systems was contemplating how to reenter the home laundry business. The company had changed hands twice since the late 1970s and, thanks to a noncompete agreement, was prevented from making equipment for homes. But that restriction was slated to end in 2004. Jay McDonald was part of the home laundry decision-making process, and he told me that the company took a close look at what kind of washing machine could be manufactured for the cheap prices that had become the going rate for models like Maytag’s. According to the company’s calculations, such “a machine can only be manufactured to last five to seven years.”
Rather than reenter the market with a low-quality, low-durability product that competes with similar machines made by much bigger companies, Alliance Laundry Systems did something heretical: “We went back in with the most expensive product out there. Our pitch: We haven’t changed anything in twenty years. It’s the same product as the 1980s.” He chuckles, and adds, “Oh, and we had virtually no marketing budget.” It was a bet that there are consumers nostalgic for the way things used to be made, and who don’t mind paying a bigger sticker price to obtain the dependability that they used to take for granted. It was a bet that there are still consumers who evaluate purchases with the same time horizons as businesses.
Those were solid bets. Alliance Laundry Systems won’t share data on sales of the Speed Queen brand, but did tell me that the business has tripled in size since 2013. “We are taking market share,” McDonald says. Speed Queen is also garnering attention. In 2019, Consumer Reports surveyed its members on their experiences with 71,038 different washers. Speed Queen was the only brand of top-load agitator washer (the type found in most American homes) to receive an excellent score for owner satisfaction and predicted reliability.
Miller, seated across from me, explains that the short lifespans of other washers—Maytag claims its washers are designed for ten years of life11—are precisely what creates Speed Queen’s opportunity. “Our customers aren’t in their twenties. A Speed Queen is their third washer. The others broke and they want one that lasts.” She pauses for just a beat. “ ‘I’ve found this brand,’ ” she says, paraphrasing the social media–driven word of mouth that’s been crucial to the brand’s success, “ ‘and it lasts forever.’ ”
Speed Queen isn’t the only company to realize that there’s money to be made by reembracing dependability, and the home appliance sector isn’t the only consumer sector in which a company seeks to differentiate itself on the basis of product lifespan. It’s happened in apparel, too (at least, at the high end). For example, Lululemon Athletica, the popular maker of athleisure highly sought on the secondhand market, has its “Five Year Collection” of short- and long-sleeved T-shirt and V-necks. They’re ridiculously expensive—$58 for a T-shirt—and it’s not clear whether they’re expected to actually last five years, so much as “stay fresh” for five years. But the quality of materials is mostly undisputed, and the volume of secondhand Lululemon Athletica already being traded among aficionados serves to justify both the pricing and the five-year claim.
“Consumers don’t want to pay more, but they will when they see the value” is how Alliance Laundry Systems’ Mike Schoeb put it to me. As products pass from first owners to second and third, that value is passed along.
Historically, it’s a slow process. But thanks to the internet, it’s speeding up. Apps like Poshmark enable consumers to flip their clothes after one or two wears. Similarly, an emerging “clothes sharing” industry gives consumers access to short-term rentals of recent fashions. Since consumers have the garments for only a short time, many of the consumers don’t care about the quality so much as they care that the styles are up-to-date. By necessity, though, the clothing-sharing companies are very concerned about quality, indeed: a garment that breaks down after a few “shares” isn’t going to be as profitable as one that lasts for dozens.
Nonetheless, as admirable as this business model might be, it isn’t nearly sufficient to make a large or immediate dent in the crisis of quality impacting apparel. And other products (washing machines, for example) are simply too big and unwieldy to be flipped or shared in developed economies (secondhand appliances are crucial in developing economies).
So what more can be done?
One option is for governments to become more directly involved in regulating the durability of products. To some extent, they already are. Minimum safety standards in cars, child safety seats, electrical appliances, and other products are common and necessary.
But stepping beyond safety to require, for example, that Maytag make washers with the same quality standards as Alliance Laundry Systems is more ambitious—and more problematic. For one thing, Alliance Laundry Systems probably wouldn’t like it. After all, the company’s booming consumer business (and its pricing) are built on the idea that consumers should be able to choose a better machine among many that are inferior. Second, and even more important, consumers who can’t easily afford Speed Queen would be the ones who suffer if governments started imposing durability requirements that raise the price of stuff. That’s not only unfair; it’d probably result in a backlash against the social and environmental goals that inspired durability requirements.
Finally, regulations requiring minimum durability standards would inevitably chill the quest for innovation in new and existing products. Forcing companies to get it right on the first go will convince many to skip the innovation and development process altogether, and just keep making what they’re already making. For most of humanity, the argument that progress must stop in favor of dependability won’t fly.
The better approach is simpler: companies must be transparent about the lifespans of their products and attach a sticker or tag (physical in stores, and virtual for online) to their products informing consumers of just how long they’re projected to last, based on verifiable testing. The requirement doesn’t necessarily have to be a government regulation in order to have an impact. A voluntary program in which industries agree on durability standards and how to label durability would work just as well (and perhaps even better).
Of course, there are many ways to measure lifespan. For some product categories, like washing machines and other home appliances, timeframes can be measured in years. For apparel, it might be a grading system that takes into account a range of factors, including colorfastness, resistance to abrasion, and durability in a home washer (these standards mostly exist, by the way). For more complex products, like laptops, fairness might dictate that manufacturers reveal the expected lifespans of replaceable parts, starting with batteries. For smartphones and other short-lasting consumer electronics products, the timeframe should incorporate the months or years that the manufacturer plans to support the product with security and other software updates.
Lifespan labeling isn’t a new or radical idea. For the last few years, governments of countries in Europe and the European Union have explored requiring lifespan labeling on certain product classes. And in the United States, upholstery manufacturers have long relied on “fabric wearability” codes to set transparent, universal standards for furniture durability. These days, most quality furniture makers include a tag disclosing long-term wearability (even though many consumers may not be aware it’s there or what it means). Similarly, ASTM International, an organization that develops voluntary technical standards, has dozens of standards related to textiles. For example, swimwear retailers might look to “Standard Performance Specification for Woven Swimwear Fabrics” when ordering woven swimsuits from a manufacturer.
Will lifespan labels work? So far, the two most robust studies (both conducted in Europe) have shown modest but tangible effects on consumer buying decisions.12 But those studies, for all their merits, focused only on the most immediate impacts. The more meaningful impacts will occur as manufacturers rethink how they design, manufacture, and market products.
Child safety seats are an excellent example of how transformative this rethink might be. At the moment, seat manufacturers have no incentive (or regulation) requiring them to reveal or compete on the durability of their products. And so long as parents can’t evaluate a seat in terms of how long it will last, manufacturers can get away with suggesting that the devices are, effectively, hazardous on expiration. Lifespan labels would eliminate that practice by forcing manufacturers to compete over lifespan—and build accordingly. Logically, the seat advertised to last ten years will outsell the one advertised to last six.
Of course, not every product category will benefit equally from lifespan labeling. If the apparel industry were to adopt a lifespan- or durability-grading system for its products—and that’s an “if”—the impact would likely be smaller. Customers who shop fast-fashion brands are unlikely to encounter the high-durability labels of Patagonia. Even so, the society-wide impact of such labeling shouldn’t be underestimated.
Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today’s secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.
a Child Restraint Systems. 49 CFR 517.213.
b Seat Belt Assemblies. 49 CFR 571.209.
c Among other notable characteristics, Car-Safety.org is home to a forum where participants one-up each other with accounts of how they keep their expired car seats from entering the secondhand market. My favorite comes from a user named southpawboston: “best to take a sledgehammer to it or a sawzall and cut it to pieces, then write all over the broken pieces ‘EXPIRED—DO NOT USE—UNSAFE’. then dispose in trash bags so as not to advertise the seat.” The advice, as outlandish as it sounds, is really just a tarted-up version of the advice that Graco offers on its website.