Were products better in the past?

By N. Moreau

It’s easy to look back down memory lane through rose-tinted glasses, convinced everything was, in fact, better in the past. Nostalgia is a powerful force. But through objective lenses, were items always better in the past? Nowadays, are clothes actually lower quality, are devices always bound to break too soon, and is craftsmanship dying out?


With the rise of social media, it’s easy to dismiss the acceleration in trend cycles as “the norm”. We buy items as though they’re disposable, swapping slightly used clothes for their newer, trendier version simply because the original became out of style. The same happens for appliances and personal tech devices; even though there is nothing inherently wrong with my iPhone, I may want to switch it for the latest model just because it has a few new updates, and not because I actually need to.


This rise in consumerism can be rooted back to the Industrial Revolution. Before then, most items were handmade. People would visit tailors and craftspeople, who would have dedicated most of their professional lives to perfect their craft. When machinery was introduced to the design process, the speed of production increased exponentially, but not without a cost in the quality of items. Over a century and a half later, during the Great Depression, American adman Earnest Elmo Calkins proposed a selling strategy for economic stimulation that defined purchasing habits of the contemporary world: “consumer engineering,” or how advertisers and designers could artificially create demand. Manufacturers can boost this demand by intentionally incorporating planned obsolescence – the practice of designing products to break quickly or become obsolete in the short to mid-term.


“That’s when manufactured products started to be sort of done in season for the cycles and fashion,” says Professor Matthew Bird, who teaches industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. “If you change the style regularly, people get tired of the style. They start to treat cars like sweaters — it’s become grossly accelerated.” He states that this demand lowers the quality of the product because the development and testing are accelerated even more.


In recent years, consumer engineering has become the role of the influencer, who fuels our consumerist mindset by naming things “cool” one day and “cringe” the next, leading to trends with shorter life spans, some dying out by the season.


The consequence of this mindset is that people are buying five times more clothes than they did back in the 1980s. But in the last 10 years, due to the climate crisis, inflation, the pandemic, and a series of other international issues, the cost of materials (such as fabric, metals, etc.) and labor have increased. In other words, it is literally impossible to maintain the same quality of goods whilst keeping the prices relatively low. So industries started to cut corners: if everything is more expensive and the customers still want to pay the same price, whilst still constantly switching styles to follow short-lived trends, both the quality of the item and the quality of the laborers’ lives have to decrease.


Material-wise, this could mean using thinner, cheaper fabric for clothes or using plastic and glue rather than metal and screws for appliances, for instance. The average customer won’t know the difference, especially when shopping online.


For workers, these cut corners often lead to being overworked and underpaid. Take the emerging fast-fashion giant, Shein, as an example: workers in some factories supplying Shein are still working 75-hour weeks, according to an investigation by Public Eye, a Swiss human rights advocacy group. In contrast, St. Paul’s students spend less than 40 hours a week at school (excluding extracurriculars) and already think it’s too much. And none of the factory workers are earning much. According to the same group, wages fluctuated between $829 and $1,382 per month. However, after deducting overtime pay, wages fell to about $332 a month. For reference, the minimum wage in the USA is $7.25 per hour, which multiplied by a 75-hour week, then 4 weeks per month, would equal $2175. Shein workers in Asia are making 15% of what they would under minimum wage in the USA, for clothes that go to consumers often in the USA, which are soon discarded after they go “out of style”.


Finally, by changing design to make items more manufacturable (more machines, fewer workers), companies can avoid higher labor costs. For products like phones, computers, remote controls, and others, it’s often cheaper to design in a way that reduces human labor. People are often required to assemble products, so designs with as few parts as possible are often preferred, as it’ll save a lot of time, and therefore money. “In the design of objects, they’re trying to reduce the amount of labor, and that changes what the object is,” Professor Bird says. “That produces cheaper goods, but it doesn’t necessarily produce better goods”. On the flip side, these objects can be harder to repair once broken, oftentimes lasting a lot less than they should.


In conclusion, yes, modern consumer goods are often of lower quality than they were in the past. According to the Industrial Designers Society of America, industrial designers often focus on three things: appearance, functionality, and manufacturability, and it’s the first two that are often sacrificed to boost productivity. We as customers must remember that these items were made to serve us, not break apart after a few uses. Maybe it’s time to slow down, take a deep breath, and invest in items of higher quality rather than chase the fast-paced trend cycles.