The Waste Makers

Six months earlier, the same Mr. Donner was quoted in Sales Management as supporting what it referred to as “artificial obsolescence.” Mr. Donner was reported stating, “If it had not been for the annual model change, the automobile as we know it today would not be produced in volume and would be priced so that relatively few could afford to own one. Our customers would have no incentive or reason to buy a new car until their old one wore out.” He clearly was concerned about giving car owners “an incentive or reason” to turn in their old cars before they wore out physically

As early as 1957, Automotive Industries reported that the low silhouette had become so low that “many people feel we have reached bottom.” It added, however, “There is a feeling that stylists are aiming even lower.” The sight line of drivers had dropped nine inches below the sight line of prewar autos. The following year, The Harvard Business Review carried an illuminating paper on product styling by Dwight E. Robinson, professor of business administration at the University of Washington. His investigations had taken him, among other places, to Detroit’s secretive studios for styling. He reported: “Stylists recognize that the extreme limits on lowness imposed by the human physique are only a few inches away and [will] come close to realization in the 1960 models.”

By the late fifties, Poiret’s law that all fashion ends in excess was indubitably being demonstrated in the automotive field

During most of the fifties, the General Motors stylists decided that the trend in silhouettes should be toward cars that were ever longer, ever lower, and ever wilder at the extremities. By 1959, one automobile executive was confessing: “In length we have hit the end of the runway.” A Chicago official estimated that just getting cars back to the postwar length would release eight hundred miles of street space for parking. There was no question, however, that millions of Americans still wanted the biggest-looking car they could get, particularly if they lived in wide-open areas where parking was not a serious and chronic problem

By 1957, the industry was heading toward an overhaul of the shell every second year. One year was becoming known as the year for “basic” change and the other the year for the “trim” change

The $200,000-a-year head of this styling department, George W. Walker—”the Cellini of Chrome”—was at one time a stylist for women’s clothing. When the 1958 models were launched, he frankly conceded that he designed his cars primarily for women. “They are naturally style conscious,” he said, and even though they may not drive the car in many cases they seem to have a major say in the choice of a new car

A columnist for Advertising Age noted that Buick—which he called the least changed of the new models—had used the word “new” twenty times in an advertisement. He added: “We find it difficult to assume that such complete and utter nonsense is justified by the need to sell 7,000,000 cars in 1957. If our national prosperity is to be founded on such fanciful, fairyland stuff as this, how real and tangible can our prosperity be?”

In the twenties and thirties, significant technological innovations such as balloon tires, shock absorbers, and four-wheel brakes were available almost every year to captivate the public. By the early fifties, however, the automobile industry was finding itself with fewer and fewer significant technological improvements that it felt were feasible to offer the public. Consequently, at all the major automotive headquarters—Ford now included—more and more dependence was placed on styling. One aim was to create through styling “dynamic obsolescence,” to use the phrase of the chief of General Motors styling, Harley Earl. The motorcar makers began “running up and down stairs,” as fashion merchandiser Alfred Daniels put it

When the new 1960 Pontiac was unveiled, The New York Times described its sculptured lines—”a horizontal V front”—and added this observation: “Emphasis is almost entirely on styling, for there are no major mechanical changes.”

Periodic style changes in a product not only create new potential customers but put the nation’s merchants on the spot to increase their sales of the product in question. The restyled product can have the effect of stimulating the dealers by persuading them that they have something new to sell. Also, periodic style changes enable the manufacturers to keep closer control over the sales quotas of their dealers and to force the dealers to launch crash selling campaigns to clear out their back rooms of old models during the last weeks before the new models are introduced.

For all these reasons the techniques of forced obsolescence of desirability pioneered in the apparel field were soon widely copied by the makers of an astonishing variety of goods, hard and soft