G'day folks,
Great find, Norm! Wish we had something like the club setup, that some Southland Kiwis have for vintage car bits, for OPE stuff:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/cus...its-the-great-big-vintage-car-parts-shed In Australia, HP, have been caught out more than once... [also note the new connection between HP and Samsung]
Yer, and Samsung were already on that path some years ago.
My motorcycle mechanic bought a fairly exy Samsung all-bells-and-whistles combo scanner/colour laser printer/copier unit. About 3 years into ownership IIRC, it just locked up one day, and wouldn't do anything but display error messages saying it needed servicing. When he made enquiries, he was told 'yep, it's programmed to do that on an elapsed time/number of pages basis - whichever occurs first'. To add insult to injury, it couldn't be serviced by the local mob - it had to go to Melbourne at his expense to be fixed, including all new toner cartridges, even if he fitted a new set before sending it down!
Dunno if he ever took it up with Consumer Affairs/ACCC, but I reckon he would have had a good case on a 'not fit for purpose/not merchantable quality' basis, as the service and freight costs were going to exceed what it cost new. Bastards!
On the planned obsolescence front, as BB says, the automotive industry was the first in the 'durable goods' sector to go this way. In the US, this really took off in the 1950's. If anyone's interested in reading how it came about, a US writer by the name of Vance Packard [appropriate surname there
] wrote a book in 1960 titled 'The Waste Makers' that's still well worth tracking down.
Even the Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck commented on the loss of durability of US passenger cars, in his 1962 book 'Travels with Charley'. He planned a freewheeling solo [with companion dog, though] tour around the US, to get to know his own country again, so he bought a 3/4 ton utility to fit with a slide-on camper.
In the course of the trip, he had cause to note the way that light trucks were still very much built to last then - he said:
I believe that American-made automobiles for passengers are made to wear out so that they must be replaced. This is not so with the trucks. A trucker requires many more thousands of miles of good service than a passenger-car owner. He is not to be dazzled with trimming or fins or doodads and he is not required by his status to buy a new model every year or so to maintain social face. Everything about my truck was made to last. Its frame was heavy, the metal rigid, the engine big and sturdy.
A commercial traveller Vance Packard knew had a similar experience - he wanted a new car, but wasn't at all impressed with the offerings of the major manufacturers, and the experiences he'd previously had with their maintenance costs. At that time [and up to 1982 in fact], there was one independent US car maker who specifically targeted the taxicab market, so their products really were built for maximum passenger/driver comfort, durability, manoeuvrability, and easy repair. Therefore he bought one of their Superba models, and was very happy with it. The company's potted history;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_Motors_CorporationWe've largely continued on a downhill path since then...
