Blog 17

Planned Obsolescence/Perceived Obsolescence

In “The Story of Stuff” Annie Leonard states us how the whole system of stuffs have arranged. “The stuffs move through a system from extraction to production, to distribution, to consumption, to disposal.” The author mentions Victor Lebow’s statement, which was retailing analyst, who said that to increase economy of country need to create a lot of consumer goods. For this thing needs two main strategies are “planned obsolescence” and “perceived obsolescence.”

“Planned obsolescence” is for creating stuffs that we can use them short time and throw away, is another word bad-quality things. These goods will fast become unusable, and people can buy others to substitute them. If many things will frequently destroyed, and people will spent a lot of money that allow increasing economy. For example, most of the cell phones are an imperfect quality. Every one or two years I have to change my cell phone because battery of it becomes obsolescent.
“Perceived obsolescence” is condition when things that we bought a couple years ago looks like so old generation, or so ugly not fashion. For instance, last year, a fashionable color was yellow, and people started to buy clothes of that particular color, but in this year are gray so, people shop clothes of this color.

I think the government of the country responsible for these marketing strategies because a government works, thinks, and cares of their nation or citizenships. People from a government must to control whole market, and don’t allow to production a bad-quality goods that have created for people. Of course, some people get benefits from these marketing strategies, like producers of these goods, and government exchequer that filled with taxes. Each year, of these strategies are run out of natural resources; increased numbers of production of goods, that raised air pollution; and people get so many and different diseases like asthma, diabetic, cancer, and so on. These reasons are after-effect of those marketing strategies. Who can say that these strategies for people, for our healthy generation? I don’t say that these strategies are right. Every year our generation becomes sicker than a year ago. The reason is the air pollution, and food that content a lot of chemical substances like fast-food, junk food and so on. I try do not eat these food, but nowadays, we face with difficulties to find healthy and proper food. I never had allergy before; but current days, my doctor found out by me the kind of allergy that resists any treatment. He couldn’t say a definite reason of this allergy, besides as the air pollution and nowadays’ food.

In short, “planned obsolescence” and “received obsolescence” advanced the economy of the country, that is an important thing for well-being country, but these both strategies make the people or generation to be sick and unhealthy that also a big problem for suffering.