Fighting Wal-mart... One Busted Iron at a Time

Today, as I was out shopping, I got a call from my wife, Chris. She told me that our ancient clothes iron had finally kicked the bucket. This iron is at least 20 years old, dating back to when I first started working a job that required me to wear clothes without wrinkles.

Today if you buy a clothes iron, you would be buying a product that (beneath the electronic wiz-bang features) is very similar to our 20-year-old iron... except for one subtle yet fundamental difference: the mindset of the product designers.

The 20-year-old iron is simple and has only a few features: a compartment for water (to make steam), a temperature dial, a cord, a heating element, and a case. The no-frills design is simple and it's clear that this product was built to be repaired if it breaks: it has simple parts that can be easily accessed and replaced.

Contrast yesteryear's simple iron with the Iron of Today, which has numerous electronic features and more moving parts. Adding the electronic features alone makes the design more complicated (clothes iron + computer = computer). And unlike the 20-year-old design, these puppies are built to become trash: they have numerous complicated parts that are virtually inaccessible since the units are factory-sealed.

It is clear that the mindset of product designers today is to produce goods that are cheap, disposable and feature-laden. These three tactics make sense from a marketing standpoint. "Features" are the main way to compete for marketshare, especially among young westerners who are accustomed to having fancy bells-and-whistles on everything. Designing a product that can be mass produced cheaply (by foreign fingers working for meager wages) seems to be another tactic of today's economy and a fundamental requirement for creating a product inexpensive enough to be picked up by Wal-mart. The final tactic, making items that are "disposable" guarantees the market for your product will never dry up! It also makes fine marketing sense with today's consumers: tossing something in the trash and buying something new can seem much easier (and more fun) than trying to repair something. What these consumers are missing is how fun it can be to take something broken and fix it!

In the case of our iron, I was able to quickly take it apart and determine that the cord was faulty. Our neighborhood has a very good hardware shop dating back to the 1940s. In my experience, the old timers there have "been around the block" quite a few times and always have great practical advice. They can be relied upon to suggest keen ways of fixing things or adapting spare parts to mend and item. Today all I needed was a spare iron/heater cord, which I was able to quickly locate for $4 . A few minutes with a screwdriver and presto chango, the iron paperweight is again a clothes iron.

Repairing my iron is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. It saved a tiny bit of space in the landfill (for someone else's defunct, disposable iron). More important in my mind is the $4 in revenue that I provided to my local hardware store. As the Wal-mart Effect rolls across our country like a consumerist manifest destiny, it is the small hardware and repair shops like these--with their spare parts and knowledgeable old-timers--that are being steam-rolled out of existence. I only hope that others in my generation will catch on to how enjoyable it is to take something broken and fix it...before everything is built to be trash.