Sep 9th, 2008
Has it Gotten Too Expensive to Fix Things?
As regular readers know, I hate waste. Yet it appears that over time our society has been much more interested in replacement than repair, which lends itself directly to waste.
Bicycling taught me that this was a trend way back. In the 1970s it wasn’t all that hard to get all kinds of pins, bearings, fittings, and springs and rebuild derailleurs and hubs when they started having issues; starting in the 1980s, all of that went away and now it’s almost impossible to rebuild those parts and they simply get replaced, even if it’s just a small thing like a spring or a pin that needs replacement.
For low dollar items, we see replacement rather than repair on a very regular basis. For instance, a foldable chair at work recently broke; it cost about $8. I glued the back rest back on, but the glue to do so was about $3; unless I had another use for the glue, I had spent almost 40% of the cost of the chair on the repair. One of the tires on my bike has a small cut in it; its difficult to fix that, but paying $20 for a new tire isn’t all that much more than the $5 for the proper rubber cement to repair it when you consider how often I’ll need to reapply the fix.
Even more expensive items are often not worth fixing. A car that works perfectly fine but is about 10 years old can be declared a total loss from a somewhat minor accident, but once the cost of the repair exceeds the estimated cost of the vehicle, it makes more economic sense for the insurance company to say the vehicle’s done for. Computer models get upgraded so often that an issue with a computer may make replacing it a wiser move than fixing it. And when was the last time you took a television that wasn’t under warranty in for repair rather than just buying a new one?
Does it make economic sense to repair rather than replace? Unfortunately, for a lot of items, it doesn’t. That’s unfortunate because doing that results in much more waste, which can’t be the best thing. Still, it’s hard for me to argue with the numbers; when it costs 40% the price of the chair to glue a piece back on, it’s time to buy a new chair. It’s sad, but it appears that replacing has taken over repairing in most cases.
My grill has deteriorated to the point of uselessness. What gets me is that the replacement parts are more than I originally paid for the whole unit! What do you do with a hulking piece of black metal on plastic wheels?
I have considered replacing the parts with superior stainless steel but, dang it, I can go buy a new stainless steel grill for less!!!
Grrr.
I am inclined to say that not only has it gotten to expensive to fix things companies are now banking on the fact that we’ll want to replace the item rather than fix it. Everything is being geared towards replacing everything and the marketing and social mentality seems to have embraced it.
I guess the worst part of the whole scenario is that the consumer is on the loosing end - if they want to fix their item they have to pay $X and if they buy a new one they have to pay $X+very little. Where we used to be able to spend a couple dollars to fix an item not its cost prohibitive. The mentality of replacement rather than reuse is a bit at odds with the more environmentally concision stance most companies are starting to take. But I guess in the end its the almighty dollar that wins.
[...] Suenaga tells us how society has changed from fix to replace in Has it Gotten Too Expensive to Fix Things? posted at Uncommon Cents. I agree that it seems more often cheaper for us to replace things than to [...]