In 1960 Vance Packard published a book about an economy that had solved production and now had to solve demand. Its subject was planned obsolescence: things designed to stop working, or to stop being wanted, roughly on a schedule.
It was received as alarmism. It reads now as description.
Wanting things to break
Obsolescence comes in two forms and only one of them is mechanical. A thing can fail, or a thing can simply stop being the current one while continuing to work perfectly. The second is far more efficient, because it requires no engineering at all. It requires a season.
Both depend on the same condition: repair being harder than replacement. Once fixing costs more than buying, durability stops being an advantage and becomes a liability on somebody's revenue forecast. Nobody has to conspire for this. The incentive does it unsupervised.
The score nobody wanted to publish
In January 2021 France began requiring a repairability score, out of ten, on the label of several categories of electronics. How easily it comes apart. Whether spare parts exist and what they cost. Whether the documentation is public.
Manufacturers rate their own products against a published method, which is a real weakness and worth saying out loud. What matters is what the score made visible. Repairability was always a design decision, taken privately, invisible at the point of sale. Printing it as a number turned a hidden choice into something a shopper could compare, and that changed behaviour in a way three decades of appeals to conscience did not.
Proof beats promise largely because proof can be embarrassing.
Where we sit, including the unflattering part
We should be plain here, because this is not the side of the argument that flatters us.
Coffee is a consumable. It gets drunk, and what it came in gets thrown away. The materials that protect it best over weeks are the same materials that are difficult to process afterwards. We have not solved that. You will not find the word recyclable anywhere on this site, and the absence is deliberate. It marks the difference between a problem we have and a claim we have not earned.
What we can be held to is smaller and testable. Nothing enters the range because it will sell. Anything we make that is meant to be kept rather than consumed has to be worth keeping, or it does not go on the shelf at all.
What keep is doing in that sentence
Own fewer things, chosen well. It sounds like an aesthetic. It is closer to an accounting position, and it is where the argument about choice ends up as well.
A thing you keep for ten years is cheap in a way that a thing you replace three times is not, and the only reason that is a controversial sentence is that it is inconvenient for nearly everyone selling anything. Including us, on the days when the easier move would be to add something.
We would rather be the last one you buy than the one you buy again next year. That is a harder business, and a much shorter list.