Why are products so cheaply made?

They don't make em like they used to. I've got a VCR from the mid eighties that still works great. The old bird's been playin' flicks for 20 years and shows no signs of stopping. Meanwhile I'm expecting Kleenex to come out with a DVD player soon as the six that I've owned in the past several years all barely made it past their pathetically short warranties. Clothing is mostly all made single-stitch these days - you've really got to shell out some loot to get the "fancy" double-stitching of days gone by. A drinking glass from IKEA will break if you look at it wrong. The furniture in most of our homes, once you strip back the faux leather is a flimsy construction of particle board, card board, and held together with cheap little nails and hope. For the third time my mechanic tells me that the flux capacitor has gone out on my Saturn and is going to have to be replaced again. Just about everything that a regular Joe can afford to buy these days seems to be pre-garbage - it's all ready to break and break fast. It didn't used to be like this - stuff used to be made to last and folks had brand loyalty because they knew that certain brands were well made. Why can't we pay a little more and get something that won't fall apart like grandpappy used to (and probably still does) have? Back in the 50's you didn't hear anyone complaining about having to get a new cell phone every few months.

The answer to this query lies in the mechanics of how sexual traits spread. No, I don't mean that slapping a pair of breasts on a lamp makes it fall apart faster nor sell better (although the idea is intriguing.) Sexual traits are any trait that directly expedites the occurrence of the sex act. While this does include T & A, it also includes behavior patterns, demonstrations of social value, and all things akin to peacock feathers. Basically it includes (but is not completely exclusive to) all things shallow that make an organism more attractive. How does this apply to the boobie-lamp in question? First I'll mention that of course diapers and frying pans and computers don't have genes. But they do have memes. A meme is a a perfect metaphor for a gene, except that instead of being made of DNA it's made of ideas. Just as a gene is a packet of information so is a meme. (For a fully detailed description of memetic theory and its impact check out Richard Dawkin's excellent book The Extended Phenotype.) A toaster has a memetic code which is a basic descriptor of everything about that toaster upon its manufacture (birth), and the success of its sales (the sex act) dictate whether its memtic code will be passed on to further generations of toasters. Toasters thusly evolve like anything else - variations in its code get tested out at the store and in the home (the environment) and more successful ones get passed on to new generations which then in turn test out new variations and so on.

Back to talking about sex. Sexual traits in the case of our toaster are fundamentally the bells and whistles (I hate getting a cheap toaster whistle, don't you?): what the toaster looks like, it's neat-o-keen features, and lastly and most importantest - the price. Because sexual traits are directly involved with the most fundamental of all actions when it comes to passing on genes, these traits evolve faster than any other simple trait in a complex organism. With a product, the most fundamental of its actions in relation to its evolution is when we pick it up off a shelf in Mart-Mart and say to ourselves - "I don't really need a new toaster, but this one is red. And it has a bagel setting! My God! Yes! I must buy it!" The product being sold is its memetic equivalent of screwing (it's only coincidental that this often involves the consumer getting screwed as well.) Because sexual traits evolve so quickly, other traits will often fall by the way-side. Price being the most important facet of a product's attractiveness, the more cheaply a product can be sold, the more it will be sold. Once one company figures out that they can make their toaster a little more cheaply and thusly sell it more cheaply, the other companies quickly fall in line as the cheapest toaster that at least looks as good as the others will always outsell the others. Sadly quality in construction is not a sexual trait and has fallen by the wayside. In fact, poor quality in construction (as long as it's hard to detect) is in fact a positive trait for the product. If it breaks after a year, the consumer has to buy another one. Thus not only reenforcing the value (to the manufacturer, not to us poor forlorn masses) of making cheap products but also speeding the replication and thusly evolution of the product in question. This also explains why the manufacturing base has shifted out of the western world and into the third world - any company that doesn't add this trait to its product will have a less memetically successful product because of the added cost of paying human beings something beyond a slave wage to make their pieces of crap.

Well-made products still exist, of course, but they're few and far between. They'll never go away completely, as rare variations always remain in the environment in anticipation of environmental shifts. For the most part, however, the products of our lives are going to have perfectly round asses, pretty eyes and sexy voices, but be entirely irresponsible, disloyal, and unwilling to do much work once we take them home to meet mom. I leave you with words of wisdom from Mr. Waits - "The Large Print giveth, and the Small Print taketh away."