Stay Free! Daily

Rockefeller Tree = Death

An acquaintance, Dave Zweig, recently told me about an idea of his to protest the Rockefeller Tree. He writes, "Since I was kid it's been driving me nuts that they kill a majestic 60+ yr old tree every year for one month of entertainment."

Alas, his plan for a web site and petition is as of yet unrealized, but I think you all may appreciate his placeholder in the mean time.

My New Favorite Thing: Catalog-Busting

We live in a two-family building and get piles of catalogs addressed to people I've never heard of. But this website, Catalog Choice, makes getting off catalog mailing lists easy, even when the catalogs aren't addressed to you personally. (The only catch is that you need to type in the "customer number"—so you can't do do it from memory.)

(Via Murketing)

Introducing the new American worker

Newsflash: kids today are self-absorbed, lazy little pricks. That's what we learned on this recent 60 Minutes episode. There have been a number of news articles on this topic: how twentysomething "millennials" raised on a diet of warm fuzzies and relentless self-esteem building are a disaster in the workplace, needing constant praise and attention. 60 Minutes focuses on how U.S-based corporations are coping by reframing old-school Successories-style motivation with new gimmicks like  "wacky" in-office parades, award certificates, and free handjobs.

A Wall Street Journal columnist blames twentysomething narcissism on Mr. Rogers (unfair!), Boomer-style permissive parenting (getting warmer), and the gospel of self-esteem (warmer still). What the press reports seem to miss, however, is the fact that this is the first generation of children raised in an environment of unabashed marketing. In 1980, corporate lobbying managed to get Congress to abolish the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate advertising to kids. With no watchdog in sight, an entire industry developed to market directly to kids. Full-length commercials began masquerading as TV cartoons. Channel One launched its in-school advertising "news" network. And junk food marketing skyrocketed. The most common message of marketing to tweens and teens is this: your parents are idiots, your teachers are dull, you're so much cooler than everyone else. But we understand you and know what you want. Product!

What may be bad news for the pampered white kids featured in the segment, though, should be good news for America's immigrants. Based on this segment, I'd say immigrants who've brought over a strong work ethic will have a great shot at out-achieving the coddled elites, once employers stop instinctively hiring rich whites. Let's hear it for class war!

Coke's bogus recycling effort

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that cola giants Coke and Pepsi are bending over backwards to make it look as if they care about recycling plastic water bottles. Bottled water makers have received a motherload of negative publicity lately, and so they've got to play defense. But while the article mentioned the token efforts Coke and Pepsi have made to reduce their piles in landfills, it fails to note a small message appearing on selected bottles of Dasani that does more to undercut recycling efforts than the company's gestures do to help. That message: NO REFILL. (I've also seen this on a different brand as DO NOT REFILL).

According to Coca-Cola's customer service line, Dasani bottles are "designed for one-time use." In other words, Coke reps wants you to recycle THEIR way, which means buying lots of Coke bottles and throwing them in the recycling bin. What they don't want you to do is to recycle in the only meaningful sense of the term: to reuse the bottle instead of buying a new one. When I asked Coke's rep why I shouldn't refill my bottle, she told me "Coke doesn't recommend that because of the sterilization process."

Ignoring the tautological reasoning, I think what she meant to say is that I'm dirty.

Supersize Returns to McDonald's

Speaking of McDonald's, the New York Times recently reported that Supersize drinks are back — only now the 42 oz. behemoth is known as the "Hugo." McDonald's you may recall, abandoned its Supersize menu right around the time Morgan Spurlock's movie Supersize Me came out.

That was three years ago, though, and so now enough time has passed that the criticism ignited by the movie is moot. That's the problem with criticism as a counter to corporate greed: its power is only short-term.

Did McDonald’s Give In to Temptation?

By ANDREW MARTIN
New York Times
Published: July 22, 2007

IT wasn’t too long ago that the only thing McDonald’s seemed good at was making people fat.

Staggered by overexpansion, listless sales and a barrage of negative publicity linking its food to obesity, the chain’s glory days appeared to be fading.

In 2003, company executives set about reinventing McDonald’s by focusing on getting better rather than bigger. In the last few years, McDonald’s has seemed to do just about everything right.

The chain has spruced up its restaurants, improved its advertising and introduced menu items that have helped to reshape its image and reinvigorate sales.

Premium salads and apple dippers brought moms back. Chicken wraps lured people during off-hours; higher-quality coffee turbocharged breakfast business.

McDonald’s stock price has quadrupled in the last four years, and the company has reported positive same-store sales, an important industry measure, every month since April 2003.

Given those results, a new McDonald’s menu item is a bit of a stunner. Remember Supersize sodas? They’re back, except this time the chain is trying a new name. Meet the “Hugo,” a 42-ounce drink now available for as little as 89 cents in some markets. A Hugo soda contains about 410 calories.

McDonald’s might as well have called it the Tubbo.

Making matters worse, Hugo ads are available in several languages, making sure that minorities — who are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic — are aware of the budget beverage.

McDonald’s officials said they were simply offering customers a variety of choices. And they emphasized that the Hugo was a summer promotion and available only in some markets.

“People, I believe, tend to drink more during the summer,” said Danya Proud, a McDonald’s spokeswoman. “People are out and about.”

She said the Hugo was being offered because of customer demand, and so far, it has sold quite well. Ms. Proud cautioned about comparing the Hugo to McDonald’s old Supersize menu.

“That’s not what this is about,” she said. “You have to put it in context with the rest of our menu.”

By offering the Hugo, McDonald’s isn’t doing anything different from its rivals, particularly Burger King, which has made huge servings, like the quadruple-patty BK Stacker sandwich, a signature of its menu.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, says she feels some sympathy for fast-food restaurants. Most are public companies that must continually find ways to grow, and she says that offering bigger sizes is an easy way to do it.

“The companies are stuck,” she said. “They must grow. Therefore they are looking for products that are going to sell. And guess what? The healthy ones don’t.”

Some nutritionists, including Ms. Nestle, think that an increase in portion sizes is partially responsible for the increase in obesity, and the evidence is compelling.

The number of people who are overweight or obese has increased sharply since the early 1980s, and during that period, portion sizes have increased greatly. Ms. Nestle and Lisa R. Young, a nutritionist at N.Y.U., found that portion sizes offered by fast-food chains are two to five times larger than when first introduced.

When McDonald’s opened in 1955 the largest soda was 7 fluid ounces, according to Ms. Nestle and Ms. Young. Now a small soda is 16 ounces, and a child’s soda is 12 ounces. And what was once considered a normal adult meal is now a child’s portion. A patty the same size as the original McDonald’s hamburger and a serving of French fries, for instance, is now offered to children as part of the Happy Meal, Ms. Young said.

The problem with bigger portions has been well documented. They are undoubtedly good deals. But put simply, if people are offered more food, they eat it.

Yet the Supersize phenomenon backfired for fast-food restaurants, particularly for McDonald’s, which is the biggest hamburger chain and carefully cultivates its wholesome, family-friendly image.

As nutrition advocates increasingly harped on fast food’s role in the obesity epidemic, so, too, did books like “Fast Food Nation,” a surprise blockbuster that focused on McDonald’s role in industrializing farming and food.

Worse yet for McDonald’s was the 2004 documentary “Super Size Me” in which the filmmaker Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, vomited on camera and gained 25 pounds.

McDonald’s dropped its Supersize menu that same year.

OF course, McDonald’s remains a burger joint, and its turnaround has been driven in part by brisk sales of its dollar menu, which includes double cheeseburgers, McChicken sandwiches and fries.

Sales of healthier items on the dollar menu remain relatively weak. “Double cheeseburgers always outsold salads 10 to 1,” said John Glass, an analyst at CIBC World Markets. But salads and yogurt provide a halo effect that makes the dollar menu more palatable. The Hugo is harder to swallow.

“They do not have to go there,” said Bob Goldin, executive vice president for Technomic, a food industry research and consulting firm. “Common sense has to prevail. No one has to drink that big of a serving.”

Ms. Young, who tracks portion sizes of fast food , said McDonald’s deserved credit in 2004 for dropping its Supersize menu and reducing portions. Neither Burger King nor Wendy’s followed suit, she said.

Wendy’s, she said, simply changed the name. A “Biggie” drink became a medium.

Now, Ms. Young accused McDonald’s of doing the same thing with the Hugo. “They got rid of Supersize and got all that good publicity,” she said. “I just think it’s a dirty trick.”

“I think they would get a lot of heat if they reintroduced Supersize,” she said, “but basically Hugo equals Supersize.”

McDonald’s has wisely recognized that its competition isn’t just other fast-food restaurants, but also coffee shops and convenience stores like 7-Eleven, where the Big Gulp remains a best seller.

But given the size of McDonald’s and its status as a cultural icon, it will always be held to a different standard. After all, Morgan Spurlock didn’t eat Burger King’s Whoppers for a month.

Hugo-size me? Not a bad name for a sequel.

George Saunders, American

An Interview with George Saunders
by Jim Hanas

[ Note: We had slated to run this interview in the final issue of the print mag, but since we're not sure whether there's going to be a final issue, I wanted to go ahead and get it out. —CM ]

George Saunders' short stories, with their characteristic absurdity and wit, have always taken aim at the ridiculous in American culture—from amusement parks to cure-all consumer products. Since 9/11, however, his work has taken on an even sharper political edge. His 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil—which started out as a children's book but turned into a parable about genoicide—pursued the logic of power to its ultimate conclusion, while occasional pieces he's written for Slate and The New Yorker have offered modest proposals that similarly dissect the machinations of the “new normal.” What if every single American went to Iraq and helped out with the mundane chores of daily life? What if we could kill all the people who want to kill us without, somehow, making more people want to kill us? What if we all simply refused to fight and went about our business?

Saunders' latest collection—In Persuasion Nation (2006)—contains stories composed both before and after 9/11, many of which stuggle to diagnose what the author takes to be the growing cruelty of American culture. In the title story, advertising spokesthings try to escape from their ritual humiliation. In another, "Brad Carrigan, American," a character on a TV show is distracted from his role by horrific human suffering.

We talked to Saunders about 9/11, the war, TV, Buddhism (of which he is a devotee), and hope. —Jim Hanas

STAY FREE!: It seems like your recent stories, particularly in In Persusation Nation, are more politically charged than your previous work.

SAUNDERS: I think so. Like many people since 9/11, I am tormented by what I see happening in the country, and also by a deeper idea that it could actually be, well, two things. One, that stupidity wins. That stupidity actually does carry the day. And second—and this is maybe a softer lesson—that, as David Byrne said, it's the "same as it ever was."

Our political system is run by dunderheads, by guys living in a different stratosphere than the rest of us. They have minimal contact with actual American life. And they might just win. Maybe I was just naive, but that was kind of shock to me. All of that angst made its way into the stories. Sometimes I wish it hadn't. I don't think that's, aesthetically, the easiest stuff to work with, but I've definitely got a level of outrage and sadness that I haven't had before. It's kind of tough to deal with. I like the Chekhovian model, where you're kind of lovingly regarding human nature—but somehow, in the last five years, I haven't felt that way. I'm trying to. I've got to find a way to disrupt the polarity that I've got in my mind—Us versus Them—and try to work with that anew, because it's a real dead end.

STAY FREE!: Is that why you've branched out into writing essays?

SAUNDERS: That was the idea: If I'm pissed off about this, let's get it out of the way and write about it. It kind of helped, and then it became fun in its own way. A story will sometimes take a year to fully overflow its banks, and those pieces are much simpler and shorter. You can just say, "I don't like penguins," and you can write a 300-word piece about penguins, and then you're done.

STAY FREE!: When you look at American culture today—commercialism, reality TV, the war, all the things that are in your stories—what do you see? What is your diagnosis?

SAUNDERS: I'll give you a couple answers. One, there's a cultural divide between the people at the top and the people underneath. So, in commercials: who's making them? A handful of people. Why are they making them? To persuade us to buy things. There's a group of people who have the power to broadcast and to put this huge machine at their disposal—this very beautiful machine that can make incredible images and sounds—and then there's the rest of the population, which is "done to." I would say that the gap between the doers and the done to is wider than it's ever been. The politicians—the people running the country—are isolated from us. I'm 47 and I've had one contact with a congressperson—[New York congresswoman] Louise Slaughter called me back one time when I wrote her a letter—but that's it. I've called a number of them, and you know that somebody checks off a box and then that's it. That's a huge thing, and I think it's a new thing. I don't think that people have ever felt as powerless or unimportant.
That's one answer. The second, and probably more complicated, answer is that it's always been thus. I've been disabused, in the last few years, of the notion that the purpose of life is to fix shit, that we're in this world to make it better. On a relative level, we have to think that way and we must think that way. But in an absolute way—from the point of view of someone who's now almost 50—you say, well, actually the world has always been trouble and suffering and discontent. It flows a bit. Who's suffering more, who's inflicting what on who—that changes. But, in a funny way, I'm starting to learn to see this all as a beautiful display, and part of that beautiful display is torment and upheaval and oppression and the whole thing. In a fishbowl, the fish food is floating around different places in the bowl and different fish are underneath the little plastic diver, but the stuff is constant inside there.

In Buddhism, there's this idea of the absolute and the relative. So what I said first is relative. The power has shifted up in an incredible way, and the people who the power has shifted away from now may have never in their life known that it was supposed to be otherwise. The whole idea of Steinbeckian America, most people don't even remember that—the idea that in the '30s the whole shit almost fell down because of the inequity. That's the relative.

The absolute is: show me three human beings gathered together where there wasn't oppression and angst and inequity and cruelty.

STAY FREE!: Are there any commercials or TV shows that have been driving you particularly crazy lately?

SAUNDERS: I was in the gym the other day and they had like 12 TVs, all with the sound down. I'm kind of an obsessive reader, so I have to read all the little captions, and there were probably two or three different things—from completely different contexts—but I was noticing how aggressive they are. One was one of these "Making the Band" kind of shows, and it was all about mocking the people who failed. And then another show was like that—"Let's get somebody to make an ass of themselves." I've noticed that there's that strain of aggression, and it's very rarified. It's not like you actually see it in real life, but they create it and amplify it.

On the other hand, I think it's kind of funny, kind of joyful, kind of crazy—so I can look at it both ways. The point of the book really wasn't, "Let's ban advertising," but just to sort of wallow in it a bit and come out a little more aware that these things aren't really neutral.

Maybe another advantage of living a long time is you see the way the tonality of commercials has changed, even in my lifetime. And it's not neutral and it's not random. It's very deliberate in the sense that somebody's deciding to make these commercials and shows more aggressive, more hateful, more agitating. I don't know why. I'm sure it's very complicated.

STAY FREE!: A theme that runs throughout the stories is that the media has become more cruel.

SAUNDERS: I'm sure they know very well what sells and what doesn't sell. The other show, in addition to the "Making the Band" show, was one of these things where they switch wives, and even just watching it on the exercise bike with the subtitles, I was getting agitated. I could feel my heart rate spiking—me getting mad at this stupid New Age mother who can't clean her own house. Obviously, they pick these people to be agitating and they prodded them so they'd be more agitating. It's like a play, but it's a play that isn't designed to do anything except agitate you so you can't stop watching it, and that doesn't seem to be in the long-term interest of the culture.

STAY FREE!: How do you think that feeds into politics?

SAUNDERS: The only thing I really believe is that we got softened up by the stupidity of our media in the days before 9/11. Your thought process and your level of articulation are intimately related. For example, if somebody said you can only use 12 words, you would get stupider. Being able to articulate a thought reinforces your ability to have that thought. In terms of our public discourse, the O.J./Monica thing softened us up so that when 9/11 happened, we didn't have our full resources to deal with it. There's some kind of relation between a culture that's all about stimulation and quick fixes and a pervasive thoughtlessness.

STAY FREE!: How did it happen?

SAUNDERS: I think you can follow the money. Infotainment was kicking the shit out of real news. Of course it would, because Pixy Stix are better than broccoli. I don't think there's anybody planning it or trying to make us easier to lead; we were made easier to lead by ourselves somehow.

STAY FREE!: Does anything give you hope?

SAUNDERS: I've been thinking about hope a lot and I think it's kind of overrated. Hope, in a funny way, is believing that the condition you're in right now is not the one you're going to be in later. When I was young, I hoped I would publish a book. I had a big idea that if I did, life would be totally different. All my neuroses would disappear and I would be truly enjoying life. But when I published the book, I actually got more neurotic. Suddenly I had something to lose. So now I'm thinking: Why do you need hope? You wake up with a certain amount of buoyancy in the day, something you want to do. I want to write to today or I want to wash the car. That seems good enough.

Jim Hanas is a Brooklyn-based writer whose short stories have appeared in McSweeney's, One Story, the Land-Grant College Review, and Fence.

The "good" news about Japan's increasingly American diet?

This story in the Wall Street Journal just caught my eye: Japanese Clothiers Update Their Lines; Changes in Diet Produce Curvier Bodies in Women. It begins:

All over Japan, retailers are scrambling to keep up with a new look known as "bon-kyu-bon." It means "big-small-big" and it signals a change in the way Japanese women look: They're getting curvier.

Japanese stores that used to keep just two or three sizes of clothing on hand are rushing to stock larger sizes... Wacoal Corp., Japan's largest lingerie company, was once known for its super-padded brassieres. Now the company has a new best-seller: the "Love Bra," a cleavage-boosting creation with less padding, aimed at curvier women in their 20s.

We've read this story before: the Japanese are eating more like Americans—more meat and junk food—and gaining weight. Of course, they're not just gaining weight: they're gaining obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and heart problems. Japanese girls are now menstruating earlier as well.

It's as if the writer of this story decided, "hey, let's look on the bright side!" The omission of any reference to the fact that the weight gain is society-wide and not limited to 15-year-olds' boobs makes this story read more like something out of Pornography Weekly than the esteemed Journal.

There is, however, this inscrutable claim:

The physical changes are largely the result of an increasingly Westernized diet, say nutritionists. Meals that used to consist of mostly fish, vegetables and tofu now lean heavily toward an American-style menu of red meat, dairy and indulgences such as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Cold Stone Creamery ice cream. All this extra protein and calcium has led to longer, stronger and fuller bodies.

Stronger? Really? No idea where that one came from, as there's not a bit of evidence here to support it. Besides, fish and tofu are protein.... leading us to think... what exactly? That all those ice cream cones and doughnuts are building muscle mass?

I'm tempted to blame this one on Rupert Murdoch, but it seems like every actual news writer at the Wall Street Journal doesn't want anything to do with him (which is to say, they oppose his bid to buy the paper). Oh, well, at least the writer gets off a nice zinger, ending off with this quote by Saki Toraiwa, a 21-year-old cashier who "likes to wear skin-tight T-shirts, jeans and high heels":

"If I'm feeling confident, I'll show it off," says Ms. Toraiwa, "but lately a lot of it just depends on what my boyfriend likes."

Are consumer products made to break? An interview with author Giles Slade

The following interview is part one of a two-part series on planned obsolescence. The second -- about housing construction -- will be posted next week is now online here.

Last year my sweetie and I inherited a microwave from the previous owners of our new (old) house. The microwave looked like a serious piece of equipment, not a cheap plastic number, but wouldn't power on. For months, we let it sit in the kitchen. When we finally managed to deal with it, our first instinct was, naturally, to toss it and buy a new one.

Sure, why not: we could buy a new oven for the same price as fixing the old. Though the new one was perhaps even more likely to break quickly, we could at least leave the old one on the curb, rather than lugging it to the repair shop. When the new one broke we could always, you know, buy yet another.

As it happens, I was internally debating this when I picked up Giles Slade's illuminating history Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Within the first two pages, Slade makes it very clear that microwave ovens are only the the tip of the iceberg when it comes to electronics that common sense tells us to discard. And discard, we do. From cell phones to PCs to computer monitors and televisions, every year sees an exponential rise in the number of machines tossed into landfills. In 2003, over 63 million working PCs were trashed, In 2004, that number jumped to 315 million. The same trend holds over a wide array of consumer electronics.

The reasons behind this are many and complex, but Slade hones in on one: companies profit more when products have shorter lifespans - because they sell more products that way. This is no conspiracy theory but, rather, simple economics. Small wonder, then, that product lifespans are shrinking across the board. In 1997, a PC was expected to last 4 or 5 years; by 2003, only two years, and today the life expectancy is even less. ; today, average life expectancy is two or three years.

As Made to Break documents, planned obsolescence is neither theoretical nor new. In fact, throughout the early half of the 20th century, business leaders openly promoted planned obsolescence in one form or another, calling it "creative destruction," "progressive obsolescence" or "adulteration."

To find out more, I tracked down Slade and talked to him by phone in late 2006.

STAY FREE!: How did book come about?

GILES SLADE: I came back to North America from teaching in the Arab Emirates after 9/11, and every interaction I had in public was very curt, very rude. I wondered where that shortness developed and ultimately became convinced that it has to do with our attitudes toward material culture.

STAY FREE!: Business people in the 1920s and up through the 1950s talked openly about planned obsolescence in trade publications. Are they less likely to talk about it now?

GILES SLADE: They call it different things now: "death dating" or "product lifespan." It's an established strategy. When a junior industrial designer is assigned to a work site and tasked with designing a product, one of the first questions is: How long is this thing going to last? How long does the competition last? How long is the warranty? This kind of planning is common knowledge among     design teams.

STAY FREE!: Yeah, I noticed when web surfing that a business school included "product obsolescence" in a course description. One of your critics on the internet, though, wrote, "I'm an industrial designer and I've never heard this!" What do you make of that?

GILES SLADE: The British designer known for creating the iPod, Jonathan Ive, probably didn't have anything to do with the battery inside the iPod. His job was to make the iPod beautiful. But Tony Fadell, the guy in charge of the engineering team and a top executive of Apple, knew very well that the battery would fail after 11 months; it would've been his decision to put it inside, where it couldn't be replaced. On large projects, tasks can be very specialized. But Steve Jobs clearly knows about this. He said in an interview that people should buy a new iPod every year. The old ones scratch very easily, so they don't look as nice after use.

STAY FREE!: Do you have proof that it's intentional?

GILES SLADE: No, but there's currently a class-action lawsuit against Apple in California, focused on the video screens being so easily scratched. The same group filed a lawsuit about the battery life and won a huge settlement from Apple.

STAY FREE!: You discussed Levittown‚ the pioneering housing development on Long Island‚ and how home builders began applying mass production techniques to real estate development in the 1940s. Could you talk a bit about that?

GILES SLADE: William Jaird Levitt said Levittown was just like a Ford Motor plant, except the stationary line was spread across a subdivision. Everything that wasn't immediately cost-effective was eliminated: porches, basements, even sidewalks. In order to sell these houses, they filled them full of brand new appliances—washers and dryers, new refrigerators and stoves. They built the houses to last 20 years, but after 5 years or so, the appliances would break down. Still, the houses were built very well. And many of the buyers were first-time home owners, so they put a lot of sweat equity into them. They added value to houses in a way that defeats obsolescence. The carports were not garages, so they'd wall them in and make it a real garage. They would put in fireplaces or...

STAY FREE!: Add a porch?

GILES SLADE: Sure, add a porch. Build up the roof. Those places go for a lot of money now.

STAY FREE!: Forgive my ignorance, but what does removing the basement do structurally to a house?

GILES SLADE: Frank Lloyd Wright hated basements because they weren't cost-effective. He said they don't do anything, they're just negative storage space. So [in Levittown] they poured a concrete step and added copper coil piping into the concrete; instead of radiators they had radiant heat.

STAY FREE!: How does that effect the longevity of the house?

GILES SLADE: It makes the copper coil unserviceable. Once it corrodes, fills up with sludge, or springs a leak, there's not much you can do about it.

STAY FREE!: Has there been much of a debate among contemporary designers and engineers about the lifespans of products they create?

GILES SLADE: Electronics engineers at IEEE conferences frequently present papers about designing for disassembly, making products reusable and less poisonous. Many of those people are at odds with their industry.

STAY FREE!: Even Martha Stewart has complained about planned obsolescence—about the number of cords and chargers required for digital devices. Here in the States, there's no standard for those things. Have other countries tackled this problem?

GILES SLADE: In Germany, there's something called the Institute for NORML that standardizes electronic devices. I think there's something similar in Japan.

STAY FREE!: Have you looked at consumer warranties at all? They seem to be shrinking. I saw some headphones the other day that had a 30-day guarantee!

GILES SLADE: Ha! All I know is that I went to the industrial standards board in Washington and they told me that the standard for durable goods was fixed at three years around the beginning of WWI. I guess that three years came from the three-year product cycle of General Motors. They figured a new GM car would come out every three years, so a car only needed to last three years. The funny thing is that three years now sounds like a long time. The average cell phone lasts only 18 months in North America and maybe 8 months in Japan, Finland, and Norway.

STAY FREE!: Lately I've noticed that inside the box of new electronic products, there's a note saying DO NOT return this item to store; instead, return it directly to manufacturer. I wonder if that is a way discouraging people from returning things in general; the more confusing the process, the less likely people are to do anything about it.

GILES SLADE: There was a watch—"the "Yankee"—called "the watch that made the dollar famous." It was stamped out of steel and came with a lifetime guarantee. All you had to do when the watch stopped was mail it back to the company and it would send you another one free. But because the watch only cost a dollar, only 3 percent of consumers ever took advantage of that offer. I think Apple has the same thing in mind with its takeback program. Most customers would have to write to them, box up the equipment, and pay to ship it. Statistically, very few people take advantage of that.

STAY FREE!: Also, Apple doesn't promote takeback at all. You have to dig for it on their website. Have you looked at repair services and how those have changed?

GILES SLADE: No, but that's an another interesting question. I do know that there is a booming aftermarket industry that has grown up around the iPod. IPods break so often and, after the warranty period, you can't get them serviced from Apple, but you can trade them in. They're very small, so it's easy to chuck them. They are designed to work only for a specified amount of time, which an Apple rep initially said was four years, but then she was challenged on that and said she meant "for years."

STAY FREE!: On Mac blogs, everyone took Apple at its word and published that as a correction. . . . I recently bought a Patagonia coat because it has a lifetime warranty.

GILES SLADE: They say that for Sears' Craftsman tools also. I haven't had a problem with Sears' tools, but I have a Kenmore dryer and it burst into flames! It was still under warranty—it was less than two years old—Sears came and repaired it, but now I'm afraid to use it. I thought Kenmore was a respectable brand but it's just some cheap model that Sears buys in lots and slaps its name on.

STAY FREE!: I have a conspiracy theory. Sometimes I think stores have intentionally bad customer service because it encourages people to buy something new rather than dealing with customer service for a return.

GILES SLADE: I think that's certainly the case with rebate programs. They make it very difficult to actually collect the rebate.

STAY FREE!: When you talk to people about your book, do you notice a generational divide in how older people and younger people feel about these issues?

GILES SLADE: Yes, younger people don't want to hear anything negative about the iPod. I might as well put a turban on and grow a long beard. It comes down to the social value of consumer goods as icons. If I'm saying something negative about your tribe's icon, it's as if I'm attacking you personally. Also, younger people have much less sense that things should last. I find that really disturbing.

STAY FREE!: It makes sense, though. If you're born into a world where things aren't made to last, naturally you won't expect them to.

GILES SLADE: Sure, but then things less than 20 years old become what we think of as antiques. So your sense of duration, of history, of culture has collapsed and evaporated. If your favorite toys are constantly updated and replaced, how is that going to effect your relationships with people? I think you're less likely to have lasting commitments to people, to family, to a country, even. There's a well-known book called Bowling Alone, and I think this is where it comes from. We've become so accustomed to things only lasting for a few years we don't invest in them anymore. We don't see beautiful things like paintings and rugs as lasting.

STAY FREE!: James Twitchell, an historian of advertising, has said that the problem with Americans is not that we're materialistic, but that we're not materialistic enough. We don't genuinely love our things; what we love is exchanging them for newer things.

You write that the rise of computers has led to the rise of information obsolescence. Could you give an example?

GILES SLADE: One way to make electronic products obsolete is to design them to not be backward compatible. Apple changed the operating system on the Nano about a year ago, and it requires an advanced physics degree to put the new operating system on the old Nano, so you can't use iTunes anymore if you have an older model.

STAY FREE!: You've gotten a lot of criticism on the web. Any thoughts on that?

GILES SLADE: I remember being called a "conspiracy theorist" in the Times Literary Supplement and puzzling over it because there's not much that is "theoretical" about my book. It has all been substantiated by people other than me. Online, a particular group of critics started to lump me in with environmentalists, and I started getting a lot of criticism on right-wing blogs. When I started talking about the iPod, technology blogs started going. Apple has an extensive informal network of pro-Apple blogs . . .

STAY FREE!: True, but there are thousands of diehard Mac fans that have no actual connection to the company.

GILES SLADE: Yes, but let me give you an example. There was a leak about conditions at an iPod factory in China. In the week following the leak, reports appeared all over the web saying that a crack investigative team looked into it and found that the rumors weren't true; there was no injustice. Well, a week or so later, all of these claims are in fact confirmed: the workers can't leave the iPod factory, they're working long hours for sweatshop wages. Apple is the champion of creating a spin cycle before anyone knows what's going on. I think they're smarter and more successful than the CIA. I can get the CIA to talk to me but I can't get Apple to.

Why aren't bikes more like toilets?

Speaking of London and toilets, I have a far-out thought I want to throw out there. We had to buy a new toilet a month or so ago and, par usual, I checked with Consumer Reports [subscribers only] to get the best buy. Turns out that toilets more efficient and better constructed than those 20 years ago can be purchased for a remarkably low cost: about $250.*

Around the same time, I was also looking into buying a bike for a birthday present. With a little research (and a lot of help from co-blogger Matt Ransford), I discovered that the only way to get a decent, durable new bike is to spend at least $1,000, which strikes me as sort of ridiculous. I bought my bike -- a Specialized hybrid -- about 16 years ago and it's still in good shape. Indexed for inflation, it would cost about $300 today.** So why the huge price increase?

Honestly, I have no idea. But one important difference between toilets and bikes -- at least here in the United States -- is that toilets are used every day and represent a huge commercial market, whereas bikes are used only recreationally, by a relatively meager segment of the population.

In countries that support and promote biking as a form of transportation, the market for bikes is bound to be more competitive. Indeed, in London, where congestion pricing is now in effect, bike manufacturers are falling all over themselves to expand the market there... which is at least part of the reason why you see swank, relatively cheap rides like the A-bike -- which can fold and fit into a backpack! --  coming from across the Atlantic.

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* I got the highest rated, the Eljer Titan, and am very happy with it. Gerber Ultra Flush was also highly rated. American Standard's "Champion" was a "best buy." Toto toilets, which are popular among fashionistas here, didn't rate particularly well. Kohler's were a disaster (like Totos, they look nice, but have a weak flush and are hard to clean).

** Ended up buying a vintage Raleigh cruiser for $175 on Craigslist.

You can't change me

Carrie has been reading about social engineering, so she keeps emailing me wacky products she thinks "we" need. For instance: a washing machine that encourages couples to share laundry duties by not allowing the same user to start the washing machine twice in a row.

Great. Now I'm going to have to hire a maid.

And then this: a high-tech sneaker that logs the wearer's exercise and converts it to television-time credits.

Make that two maids. How am I going to find one that wears a men's size 10 shoe?