Episode 1 The Men Who Made Us Spend

We live in a world where spending never stops.

-LAUGHTER WOMAN:

-Cherie? Cherie?

You're going to need to be tannoying this.

-WOMAN:

-'Ladies and gentlemen, can you please stop panicking.'

But why DO we buy what we buy?

And how is our desire to spend manipulated?

Every other company on earth is trying to get you to spend money

and they're putting all their effort into getting you

to spend your money on stuff all the time.

I'm Jacques Peretti and in this series

I'm going to investigate the men who've made us spend.

I'll discover how products

were deliberately made to break, so we buy more.

Planned obsolescence is an open secret.

When I'm talking to professional management people,

they all said, "Well, we all know this."

How we've been reprogrammed to dispose of our possessions.

I don't think individual advertising campaigns

-change people's views completely.

-Why are they still doing it, then?

-They're not still doing it.

-Well, they did in 2012.

You ran a campaign that said you should leave your sofa on the sidewalk.

And how technology has been used to perfect consumerism,

making us constantly hungry for more.

We want the new thing.

It's hard-wired into our brain to be looking for new stuff.

The marketers have figured out how to take advantage of that.

CHEERING

This looks like a concert but it isn't,

it's a lavish promotional video

for the launch of a new gaming console, the Xbox One.

Five! Four! Three!

Two! One!

And the star of the show is a small plastic box costing £450.

-ALL CHANT:

-Xbox One! Xbox One!

Xbox One! Xbox One!

Consumer technology has moved centre stage.

This footage shows how it's treated with an awestruck reverence

once reserved for A-list celebrity, except now it's a console.

SHUTTERS CLICK

And Xbox learned about the orchestrated hysteria

around a product launch from the masters, Apple.

-Are you ready?

-ALL:

-Yes!

For the past seven years, people have queued for hours or even days

to get their hands on the latest upgrade.

We've been out here 15 days - two weeks and one day.

CHEERING

But what drives people to wait in the cold for a new phone?

I've come to the Apple Store on Regent Street

to talk to the very patient man

at the front of the queue for the new iPhone 5S.

And what's the 5s going to do that the 5 doesn't do?

Erm...probably not much.

There's a fingerprint scanner, which is very cool.

So you've queued for three days to buy a new phone

that is not going to do much more

than the phone you've got at the moment?

At the end, I'll walk away with something new that we all want.

Thousands of people are waiting in line.

-How long have you guys been waiting?

-18 hours.

-18 hours.

What is it that's so special

about having the newest phone, the latest phone?

The rate that they change,

they change so quickly you don't want to be left behind, do you?

Why is it so important for you to have the latest phone so quickly?

Because this time they are in different colours.

Because it's a different colour?

-Yep.

-That's what's brought you here?

-Yeah.

It's a part of my life... at the moment.

It's one minute to eight

and the doors of this Apple Store are about to open.

And close to 3,000 people queuing

are going to go in and buy the iPhone 5s.

And the allure, the magic of owning that phone,

the new phone, is still there.

-ALL:

-Five! Four! Three!

Two! One!

CHEERING

It's like a Hollywood premiere

and all because you can get a phone that's a little faster.

But the flip side of the hysteria for the new

is that the new becomes unwanted, fast.

Yesterday's desired item is tomorrow's piece of trash.

This is a waste facility in California

like thousands across the globe,

except this is one with a difference.

There are boxes and boxes of shiny new, unopened technology.

If you look around here you'll see

quite a few brand-new products still in their boxes.

-Yeah. There's some printers there.

-Yeah, brand-new.

Never been opened. Here's a bunch more right here.

-Wow!

-And those are...

-They've never been used?

-Never been used.

-Wow!

So those are products that...

for one reason or another, they decided

that they would rather destroy

than try to sell it to somebody who might need 'em.

This cycle of things becoming almost instantaneously obsolete

is at the heart of consumerism today.

After festivals, sites are strewn

with brand-new tents used just once.

Many of us are happy to spend and discard,

and it's this churn of products that supports our whole economy.

And the concern is that our economic recovery

is being driven once again by consumer spending.

We live in a world of almost limitless consumption,

but this didn't happen by accident.

The cycle of relentless spending and throwing away was engineered.

But how did this happen?

To discover its origins I've come to Berlin.

In the 1920s, manufacturers hit upon an idea

that would become fundamental to the consumer economy -

artificially limiting the life span of a product.

It was known as "planned obsolescence" -

making a product that is deliberately designed to break.

And planned obsolescence began

with one of the most basic consumer products of all...

the light bulb.

This is the former Osram factory in East Berlin.

It hid a secret about light bulb production

until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the early 1990s,

long-forgotten papers were discovered in this factory.

They revealed an extraordinary secret deal

that would provide the template

for the consumer obsolescence we live with today.

In the 1920s, a coordinated decision

had been taken by a global cartel of companies

to reduce the life span of bulbs.

It was known as the Phoebus Cartel.

The cartel's origins came from the chairman of Osram,

his name was William Meinhardt.

Meinhardt wanted to standardise and control

the way in which light bulbs were manufactured.

In 1924, the world's biggest electrical companies

hammered out a deal in Geneva.

Its aim was to increase profits by fixing prices and production quotas.

It would also dictate the length of time a light bulb could last.

What's extraordinary is that the rules

governing the way the cartel would control production

were all written down in minute detail.

These papers were discovered by German researcher Helmut Herger.

Helmut, how did you first come by these documents?

Well, I know, after the Wall came down,

I knew the Workers Council people of the light bulb factory.

And when the factory closed down they saved the archive.

This first point is - "1. Control.

"The life of general lighting service lamps shall be controlled."

Before the Phoebus Cartel existed, how long did a light bulb last?

-The light bulbs lasted 2,500 hours.

-And after the Phoebus Cartel?

They reduced them down to 1,000 hours.

'The bulb that comes off the assembly line today

'has a filament of pure metallic tungsten

'that burns white-hot for 1,000 hours.'

Bulbs that lasted longer burned less brightly.

The companies maintain that the 1,000-hour life span

was a compromise between these two factors, durability and efficiency.

Yet the impact on sales was phenomenal.

The year the agreement was signed

one lighting company executive wrote...

And any company that broke the cartel was threatened with fines.

It's incredible because, actually,

when you look at the rules that have been written down,

this is called "basis of fining",

it says if it lasts 20 hours more. you'll be paying so much money,

50 hours more, a higher amount,

-75 hours...

-Swiss money, yeah.

The Phoebus cartel was ended by the war.

But Helmut has uncovered hard proof of planned obsolescence.

And others are investigating how it operates today.

I've come to meet Stefan Schlegel at Berlin Technical University.

Stefan is studying obsolescence in consumer goods

and he's shocked by how pervasive it is.

Planned obsolescence is an open secret.

When I'm talking to professional management people at congresses

and so, they all say, "Well, we all know this."

Stefan has identified obsolescence in everything,

from washing machines with heating elements which fail too early,

to electric toothbrushes with sealed panels

preventing you from changing the batteries.

The clearest example of all is the printer cartridge.

This is from a printer, right?

Yeah, this is from a printer. It's a cartridge.

-OK.

-And there is a counter inside.

-What does the counter do?

It counts the pages you've been printing with this cartridge.

So it is there. It's like a clock counting down to 50,000 pages.

And then it's saying, "I'm empty."

And it's just this simple dial here

-is effectively counting down to the moment that it stops working.

-Yeah.

So you can reset the counter, you know. You can reset it.

And a friend of mine just do it,

reset it, put it inside again and it's still printing.

And he's putting it down to zero,

reset it, for three times, and it's still printing.

That's... All you would have to do is reset it and it would work,

but instead you have to buy a brand-new cartridge?

-A brand-new one or refilling it.

-Yeah.

This is planned obsolescence in the cartridge of a printer.

Obviously.

The open secret of planned obsolescence that Stefan talks about

is now becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Manufactures are even being accused of inserting electronic chips

into printers to tell us the ink has run out when it hasn't.

Planned obsolescence is now being woven

into the very fabric of our everyday lives.

We live in a world of products

designed to have a limited life span and accept it. But why?

Because the idea of continual spending

is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness...

..not as a needless activity but as a duty.

A duty...to consume.

This began during the Cold War.

The world faced a choice between competing brands -

capitalism or communism.

'Capitalists.

'They've worked and saved to make

'the biggest single purchase in their lifetimes.

'They have a share of America's wealth,

'they've seen capitalism work.'

I've come to meet Lizabeth Cohen of Harvard University.

How important was consumerism

as a way of kind of defining democracy?

American democracy was viewed as

really linked deeply to mass consumption.

Not only that everybody could have goods

and could live a prosperous life,

but that we had choice as consumers.

In contrast to the Soviet Union, where not only

did they not have the kind of material goods that Americans had,

but they also had no choice.

But, in the 1950s, cracks were already beginning to show

in the edifice of consumerism.

In 1951, Ealing comedy The Man In The White Suit

wryly satirised the idea that the public

were being duped by companies using obsolescence.

Set in the heart of the industrial north, it imagined what would happen

if a product were to be created that never broke.

Some fool has invented an indestructible cloth, right?

-Yes.

-It will knock the bottom out of everything

down to the primary producers.

The sheep farmers, the cotton growers.

The importers and the middlemen. It will ruin all of them!

It wasn't only the mill bosses - the mill workers were unhappy.

Now what do you think of him?

-And you think they'll go ahead with it?

-Certainly.

You're not even born yet.

What do you think happened to all the other things?

The razor blade that never gets blunt,

the car that runs on water with a pinch of something in it?

No, they'll never let YOUR stuff on the market in a million years.

The film reveals that far from being a time of consumer naivety,

the '50s saw an acute awareness of an economy built on obsolescence

and an active debate about

whether the tactic of making goods to break was acceptable.

But consumerism was about to face a bigger problem -

people weren't buying enough new things fast enough.

There was an assumption for, I would say, at least a decade

that there was no end to the prosperity

that would come with mass consumption.

But, at a certain point, and I would say by about the mid-1950s,

there were advertising executives, marketers who were realising

that there was going to be an end to this profitability,

that at a certain point these markets would get saturated.

And what would happen then?

And they experimented with different approaches.

So how do we get people to keep buying once you have

that vacuum cleaner and that refrigerator and that...car?

If consumerism were to speed up, as manufacturers wanted,

they needed a new and far cleverer plan.

The answer lay with an idea from one man -

the psychological reprogramming of the consumer.

His name was Alfred P Sloan, the head of General Motors.

Pessimism has no place in the American scheme of things.

I am the greatest possible optimist

on the future of America and our whole system.

His 33 years at the helm saw the company become

the biggest car manufacturer in the world.

Before GM, Henry Ford had dominated the market

with one uniform car, the Model T,

and the slogan that "you can have any colour as long as it's black."

But Sloan realised that he could vastly increase sales

by offering a different car for every income bracket.

He could segment the market over and over.

# Oh, the good life

# Full of fun

# Seems to be the ideal... #

But even having several lines of car

wouldn't be enough to keep the sales rolling in.

Sloan wanted customers to buy a new car every year,

like a new coat or a pair of shoes.

GM called this theory of continuous upgrade

"the organised creation of dissatisfaction".

This is the car that epitomised Sloane's new selling philosophy,

the '56 Chevrolet Bel Air.

Legendary car designer Tom Martino

began his career at General Motors working to the Sloan philosophy.

Oh, this is beautiful!

-A four-door hardtop.

-The newest of the new.

The Bel Air Sports Sedan.

Oh! That's a car to fall in love with!

How often would you have to change the shell of the car,

the appearance?

-At that time, the hype of that was every year.

-Every year?

-Every year they changed the sheet metal.

-Wow!

Is it true, Tom, that this colour, you get this incredible sheen,

-it was derived from nail polish?

-Mm-hm. Yeah.

Can you see the glow?

I mean...again people matching their dress to their cars or their shoes...

it's much more fashionable.

Sloan flipped what was important to the consumer on its head.

Instead of engine and reliability being main stage,

it was now the seemingly superficial add-ons - colour or tail fins -

that drove the sale.

'Chevrolet's royal-tone styling

'puts ever more emphasis on exterior colour, a rainbow of 26

'entirely new solid tone and two-tone colour combinations.'

So, Sloan, did he reboot obsolescence in a way?

Because before that it was planned obsolescence,

things done to an object,

he made it about obsolescence being in your head,

you yourself would CHOOSE to want the new.

Yeah, you don't need to buy a new car,

mechanical-wise it's still brand-new, a year old,

but make you feel like the new one's better

-and "I have to have one" is quite a genius way of doing things.

-Yeah.

Soon, this idea, the organised creation of dissatisfaction,

spread across the Western world...

# I'm in with the in crowd... #

..helping to drive economies

during the boom years of the 1950s and '60s.

And to Britain, as we came out of austerity.

'Bathrooms go on getting better every year.

'They can be improved inexpensively,

'but it's nice to have a peep at one where money's been no object.

'The tap's running. Half an hour on the phone and she'll be underwater.'

For two decades, consumers enjoyed a prosperity

that was previously unimaginable.

The British had embraced consumerism and spending

with as much enthusiasm as the Americans had before us.

We enjoyed redoing our homes,

changing our cars on a regular basis,

but this new consumer paradise

was about to be hit by hard economic fact.

At the end of the '60s,

wages, which had previously kept pace with prices, began to stagnate.

And by the mid-'70s, when prices soared, we had a problem.

People were looking through the shop window at the consumer paradise

but can no longer buy it.

'A chrome standard lamp.

'A set of stacking stools.

'A cuddly black cat.'

-ALL CHANT:

-Heath out!

-What do we want? ALL:

-Heath out!

-Heath out!

-What do we want?

-Heath out!

In 1974, this double whammy of rising prices and stagnating wages

reached crisis point with the miners' strike.

We're not going to accept pennies.

We're not going to accept pennies this time.

We've got to win it, haven't we?

If he beats us, what chance has other people?

They've no chance whatsoever.

This wasn't an elevated ideological struggle between left and right -

these were angry consumers.

Heath out! Heath out!

Ted Heath paid the price, falling from power.

The new Labour government fared no better,

spectacularly failing to halt the fall in living standards.

Economist Bernard Donoghue

ran re-elected Prime Minister Harold Wilson's policy unit.

-Oh. Nice to meet you.

-Thank you very much.

I don't think the Labour Government fully understood,

and I know I, in Number 10, didn't fully understand

that the squeeze on real incomes

producing falling real incomes in the second half of the 1970s

meant that the workers wouldn't put up with it any more.

Do you think that the trade unions

were just really trying to keep up living standards for their members

and, in a way, pursue the consumer dream?

The unions were reacting to the particular situation -

that their members were suffering reductions in their real incomes.

A consequence of that

is that they couldn't buy as many of the consumer goods

as they'd grown accustomed to, and their wives had assumed,

so there was a move in the union movement

towards individualism, materialism,

a bit of "grab what you can",

regardless of the impact on the rest of society.

Demands for higher incomes led to repeated strike action

culminating in the Winter of Discontent.

'In the shops, the threat to food supplies

'is getting larger every day.'

By the end of the 1970s, consumerism, Mark I, was over,

but its demise had threatened to make Britain ungovernable.

'70s Britain feels like another country.

So, how did we go from the bleakness and conflict of that decade

to a 21st-century Britain obsessed not with class war but shopping?

The answer lay with one man, a wealthy chicken farmer

who wanted to use his money to bring about a new vision for Britain.

Anthony Fisher brought the idea of battery farming to the UK,

making millions from his company, Buxted Chickens.

'Now, about a quarter of all the laying hens in this country

'are kept like this, often thousands of them all under one roof.'

But Fisher wasn't just a chicken farmer.

He cared passionately about freedom of the individual.

Fisher believed the British people had been penned in by the state

and by trade unions, and he wanted to set them free.

After the war, I found England slipping into socialism,

the people somehow believing

that the government was going to solve all their problems.

In the late 1940s, Fisher had become enthralled by the ideas

of a radical Austrian economist called Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek believed that the government policies of the post-war period

were a form of serfdom.

Companies and individuals should be free to spend what they want.

Fisher wanted to put Hayek's free-market philosophy into action.

He wanted to become a politician.

But Hayek convinced him his money would be better spent

on setting up a new type of organisation called a "think-tank".

He told me, "Keep out of politics

"and make your case to the intellectuals,"

that is the teachers,

the students and the media, because they, in turn, influence the people.

Fisher followed Hayek's advice.

In 1955, he set up the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Through the years of Wilson and Heath,

it toiled away in the wilderness,

but with the turmoil of the 1970s, the IEA's moment had suddenly come.

Patrick Minford was one of the many young economists

who wrote for the organisation at the time.

The IEA was...was trying to explain to people how free markets worked

and that the best organisation of an economy

was one where individual consumers and producers

were empowered to produce what people wanted.

Market forces.

And the idea was, you know,

people would therefore produce better stuff

that people actually wanted to buy.

No longer would Britain be divided by tribal loyalties,

by communities built around localised production.

Now we would be consumers

whose spending power would change our sense of belonging.

In free markets, the consumer is sovereign,

the whole point of free markets is to give the consumer sovereignty

and to allow people, ordinary people, to conduct their lives

in a way they want, which is consumerism.

With Britain in chaos, the free market ideas of the IEA

were seized upon by Conservative politicians, then in opposition.

And then they want us all out. Angus, hello. In you go.

In particular... I'll bring you all out in a moment.

They were looking for an idea that would give Britain

a new unifying identity,

built not on class war, but economic freedom and consumerism.

So these were the ideas that were starting to be pushed

by writers for the IEA in the '70s.

And they then were taken up by Mrs Thatcher,

when she came into the leadership, and Keith Joseph,

to formulate a new strategy.

Let me give you my vision.

A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns,

to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master,

these are the British inheritance.

APPLAUSE

They are the essence of a free economy

and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.

APPLAUSE

The '70s saw Britain riven by ideological conflict,

but the ideas of the Institute of Economic Affairs

offered a way out - a new, depoliticised identity

for ordinary people, not as workers, but consumers,

freed to spend.

The politicians promised us prosperity

built on the economic freedom of this new consumerism, Mark II.

But, to some, this wasn't salvation...it was brainwashing.

Just as 30 years earlier, with The Man In The White Suit,

consumerism was attacked on film.

This time it was a horror movie, Dawn Of The Dead.

Director George Romero portrayed consumer society

not as a form of freedom but as a new type of slavery.

To Romero, the consumer was not an individual, but a zombie,

blindly following the herd into the shopping mall.

-What are they doing? Why do they come here?

-Some kind of instinct.

A memory of what they used to do.

This was an important place in their lives.

But Romero's critique didn't chime with the public mood.

Consumerism was about to lift off like nothing ever seen before.

Economist Juliette Shaw has examined how the early 1980s

laid the foundations for the almost limitless consumption we have today.

In the '70s, you had wages failing to keep pace with consumerism,

which obviously created strife with the unions and so on.

I'm wondering how, in the '80s,

how was it possible for consumerism to keep on the rails?

This was a period

in which the nature of the sort of consumer culture changed

from being one in which people aspired to something 10%-15% more

than what they had,

to being a time when people started aspiring to be rich.

And the mechanism that squares that circle, if you will,

is consumer credit.

Because this is also the time when consumer credit

becomes much more available, and that's a relatively new thing.

Now all you need to do

is pull a little plastic square out of your pocket -

it's like a sort of magic fetish -

and, boom, you're able to buy things that you didn't have the income for.

But easing credit was only the first piece in the jigsaw.

A new technological innovation would also transform choice

and make goods vastly cheaper.

And it was brought about by this man, Mike Riddle.

Riddle invented a computer programme which became AutoCAD.

Released in 1982, it allowed designers to use computers

to tweak the shape of products in a way previously unimaginable.

The explosion of choice would fill

the giant new out-of-town retail parks.

What did computer-aided design enable designers to do?

It allowed us to make a lot of variations cheaply.

The big impact was on cost.

So we could have hundreds of different designs.

Instead of saying, "Here's the one standard toothbrush,"

we could have hundreds. They can all be a little bit different.

From now on, CAD would allow

everything from perfume bottles and luggage,

to kitchen equipment, even deodorant bottles,

to be designed on a computer.

The shape and the moulding, the shaping of things,

that was a new innovation as a result, wasn't it,

the ability to do that?

Right, before CAD, these products all tended to come

in very, very similar containers.

You would buy a bottle, like you look at shampoo or lotion bottles,

they would all be a straight cylinder,

-a different top, maybe a different label.

-Yeah.

Now every one has a different shape, subtle curves to it,

things they would never have thought of before

because they would have been too expensive.

MUSIC: "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode

MUSIC CONTINUES FROM HEADPHONES

By enabling an array of dizzying choice,

CAD made things desirable and cheap,

and this new 1980s world of consumer wonder,

created an unprecedented consumer binge.

New products become very important.

The turnover in the fashion cycle really shrinks.

And that's part of what my research shows -

the amount of time between

when a householder, a person, buys something

and when they discard it because it is no longer socially valuable.

Not because it doesn't work any more -

it still has utilitarian value - but because it is passe.

It's no longer something that is worth anything

because there's a new model out.

And the trailblazer for disposability

was the reinvention of the watch.

Swatch's supercharged ads

show how they turned an old-fashioned business,

based on quality which lasted a lifetime,

into THE symbol of '80s fast, disposable consumerism.

DEEP-VOICED MALE: These days it's fashion that makes us tick.

-Oh, wow. This is your collection of watches.

-Yep.

Darren Clare worked as head of sales for Swatch in the UK.

Darren, how was Swatch able to turn a watch

from something you had for a lifetime

to, you know, basically these?

Owning one of these and then wanting another one,

and another one, and another one.

I think, really, the key was linking to the fashion industry.

And, also, having 100-plus new watches

every single year being launched.

So we had a spring/summer and autumn/ winter collection, every single year.

As glamorous as a Duran Duran video,

the ads were aimed at young, fashion-conscious consumers.

'I like your Swatch!

'Sink or swim in it, work out in a gym in it.

'A Swatch is made to take it cos it's Swiss-made - Swatch!'

And it was brand-new.

I think it was literally market-changing.

Nobody had done anything like this before.

Swatch wanted people to buy four watches a year.

They sold a million in 1983 - their first year -

and by 1986 were selling 12 million.

Swatch revealed how much money could be made

by turning what had been a long-lasting consumer item

into a frequent purchase.

And even though a Swatch was cheap,

it was made desirable by being "designer".

The designer revolution of the '80s and '90s

cloaked a tidal wave of cheap goods onto the high street

that we bought and discarded without shame.

But it's one company that epitomised

the new junction of cheap throwaway goods

and designer lifestyle aspiration

like no other -

IKEA.

-ED NORTON:

-The Klipsk personal office unit,

the Hovetrekke home exer-bike...

IKEA's totemic place in consumer culture

was first highlighted in Fight Club.

I had it all.

Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections...

IKEA was singled out as the brand Edward Norton's antihero

cannot escape from.

His obsessive desire to fill his house with their furniture,

shows how consumerism has taken over his life.

It wasn't just Edward Norton's character in Fight Club -

we were ALL rushing to conform.

Like everyone else in Britain, I filled my house top to bottom

with IKEA.

# I have a dream

# A song to sing... #

The company was founded in the 1940s by Ingvar Kamprad.

From the beginning, he was single-minded in his ambition,

and today it's the world's largest furniture retailer.

But it was in the '90s, when IKEA conquered Britain,

that its profits went stratospheric.

By 1994, IKEA had global sales of nearly five billion a year.

-REPORTER:

-They queued from the early hours for a first glimpse

into the Aladdin's cave alongside the M62.

# I believe in angels... #

Johan Stenebo worked at IKEA for 30 years

climbing the ladder to become Kamprad's right-hand man.

And what happened when IKEA came to Britain?

First of all, IKEA's concept was enormously strong,

and there was a huge void in the market in the UK.

Their ads cleverly sought to persuade the British public

to buy into the new home style revolution.

# Chuck out the chintz

# Come on, do it today

# Prise off that pelmet

# And throw it away... #

So there came IKEA with all these colourful Scandinavian ideas

of how to, you know, furnish your home.

# Our homes could be playful and happy and light

# Loose and informal and stripy and bright... #

What IKEA did was to elevate the prices,

so IKEA in the UK had the highest prices

because there wasn't any competition. Who would blame them?

They had the highest prices in the whole IKEA world.

Therefore, IKEA in the UK had the highest profits.

So, it was an enormous success.

And I think people were...

way up in IKEA were dumbfounded by the success.

Britain no longer has the highest prices in the IKEA world,

but the prices didn't stop IKEA

changing the way British people bought furniture.

Do you think that IKEA ushered in

the disposable, throwaway culture that we live in today?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think we were definitely guilty of that.

When IKEA got to the US,

they made this explicit, with an ad directed by Spike Jonze,

which mocked people's sentimental attachment to belongings

and directly challenged them

to modernise their lives.

SCANDINAVIAN ACCENT: Many of you feel bad for this lamp.

That is because you're crazy.

It has no feelings, and the new one is much better.

What IKEA did was an extraordinary trick,

which was to take the idea of home furnishings, of furniture,

which was traditionally a big-ticket purchase -

something you bought for life, a sofa -

and to make it essentially the same as a packet of crisps

that you throw away.

Everything, no matter how big it is, is ultimately disposable.

Regardless if it's a sofa or a mug,

it's designed with a fashion.

And fashion tends to be...

to have a limited life span.

You can still find this throwaway idea in IKEA's marketing.

This print ad from Canada dates from 2012.

But IKEA prides itself on its green credentials,

like a programme to get all its wood from renewable sources by 2020.

Steve Howard is the global head of sustainability.

I wanted to ask him how the company squared the contradiction

of their green ambitions and their ads.

Steve, I asked one of your former senior executives

if IKEA had ushered in the throwaway consumer culture,

and his answer was "Yes, we definitely did."

"Chuck out your chintz", which I've actually looked at online and it's...

Maybe we'd say, "Recycle your chintz,"

if we did the same advert today.

The whole IKEA business idea is

trying to make beautiful, affordable, sustainable

quality products that are good in people's homes.

And the people behind the campaign to leave the lamp on the sidewalk,

they said that this was actually

a campaign to overcome the durable goods mindset of the consumer.

So this was IKEA engineering a change in the way

we look at the products we're buying,

so that we can throw them away.

I don't think individual advertising campaigns,

whatever the advertising executive was thinking at the time,

change people's views completely.

But why run a campaign, if you're not trying to do that?

We wouldn't, we clearly... We wouldn't do that today.

How successful are you going to be in preventing IKEA

from running campaigns... advertising campaigns,

that suggest we throw away our consumer goods?

Jacques, I think we're going to show this interview

to our global marketing team as a training video to say

let's have more sustainability messaging on this. And if we look...

Steve, that's not enough.

You need to guarantee that you're not going to have

an advertising campaign that says you should throw away these goods.

If you're genuine on sustainability, that's what you should be doing.

I will raise the conversation with our marketing people

around the world, but they've already had it and actually...

-Why are they still doing it?

-They're not still doing it.

They did in 2012 - a campaign saying you should

leave your sofa on the sidewalk.

-You can't guarantee it.

-I will actually make sure, while I'm here,

we do not do a "dispose the sofa" -

I'll write to our marketing matrix about it.

20 years after it first came to Britain,

IKEA was still provoking hysteria

when opening a new store at Edmonton in north London in 2005.

Such scenes have become increasingly common in recent years.

-VOICE ON CCTV:

-Oh, my God!

This is what happened when Primark opened in Oxford Street.

And now we have imported the pre-Christmas madness

of Black Friday sales from the US.

Cherie! Cherie! You're going to need to be tannoying this!

'Ladies and gentlemen, can you please stop panicking!'

LAUGHTER

But the biggest example of consumer frenzy in the last ten years

was the 2011 riots, which cost an estimated £200 million

and affected 48,000 businesses.

It began here in Tottenham.

The most targeted stores of the 2011 riots

give a good indication of the most desirable goods in modern Britain.

And more popular than clothes or trainers

was consumer technology.

And right at the top of the shopping list...

the mobile phone.

The choice of phones as a prime target for the London rioters

was evidence of the hold these items have over all of us.

And at the heart of their allure

is the idea of continuous obsolescence -

the perpetual, never-ending upgrade,

first dreamt up by General Motors over 50 years go.

And the man who perfected it for contemporary consumerism

was Steve Jobs.

-AUDIENCE MEMBER WHOOPS

-An iPod.

-LAUGHTER

-A phone.

-LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-Are you getting it?

APPLAUSE

This huge launch was Jobs introducing

the very first iPhone in 2007.

Since then there have been seven generations,

and the pressure to upgrade intensifies with each new launch,

making us feel that our existing Apple product

is out of date and obsolete.

I wanted to know whether those who worked within Apple

could explain whether it was great design,

or this relentless drive for profit that drove each upgrade.

Dan Crow came into Apple

as one of the chief designers in the late 1990s,

working alongside Steve Jobs.

I wondered, Dan, under the aegis of design,

whether, really, what Steve Jobs was creating

was an amazing, perfect money-making machine.

The idea of the perpetual purchase,

the rolling consumption of the upgrade.

Apple got extremely good at iterating it,

making each step of the product better and better and better.

Now, partly that drives upgrades, right?

People want the latest and greatest, and I think that's quite interesting.

But it's also very much about the technology and about the...

how can we make something better and better.

But, in recent years, has innovation slowed?

So, if you look at the latest iPhones

you can make it a little bit faster and a little bit nicer,

and you can put gold on the back,

and a fingerprint sensor on, which is great, but...

it isn't actually that different

from the generation that came before.

I think we're seeing the natural plateauing of the product

It's reached its...its...peak.

It's probably about as good as it's going to get.

Apple have perfected the idea of obsolescence

first revealed in the 1950s,

making us want something a little newer, a little better...

..a little sooner than is necessary.

But there are those who believe

that Apple are also guilty of making it difficult for us

to keep hold of our existing products,

even if we don't want to change them.

Back in 2004, the jewel in Apple's crown was the iPod,

the silhouette motif of its advertising campaign

emphasised the product's universal appeal.

# So one, two, three, take my hand and come with me

# Because you look so fine And I really want to make you mine

# I say you look so fine that I really want to make your mine... #

But two brothers here in New York City

started their own campaign

which they called iPod's Dirty Secret -

that the batteries didn't last more than 18 months.

DOOR CHIMES

-Jack, welcome.

-Nice to meet you.

-Good to see you. Come on in.

-Thanks for your time.

Casey, what prompted the campaign?

Well, this is ten years ago now.

I'd just gotten the iPod and it was 400,

so a year later - a year and a half later -

when the battery died, and I wanted to fix it,

I wanted my iPod back.

I called the Apple 800 number, the AppleCare number.

I explained that my battery was dead.

-RECORDING:

-'Erm, the battery... How old is it?

-'About 18 months old.

-18 months? OK.

'It's past its year, which basically means...

'There'll be a charge of 255, plus some mailing fee.

'To send it to us to refurb it.

'To correct it.

'But, at that price, you know, you might as well go get a new one.'

So, my brother and I came up with this idea to make a movie

where we made this stencil that said

"iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months."

# What you got to do now

# Express yourself

# I'm expressing with my full capabilities... #

And then we spray-painted, using that stencil,

on all of those ubiquitous iPod silhouette advertisements

that were all over the city.

Then we posted that movie online and, erm...

it went crazy.

So you got... How many hits were you getting?

Well, it was tough. This is pre-YouTube.

But I think we did around five million views in a couple of weeks.

And what did Apple do?

Apple didn't really address it.

They did shortly thereafter change the policy

and enact a battery-replacement policy.

But it's built-in obsolescence, isn't it?

It absolutely is built-in obsolescence.

Casey's campaign has kicked off an entire movement

dedicated to fighting built-in obsolescence.

Here in California, a new consumer fightback is now under way.

I have come to San Luis Obispo to meet one of the leaders.

-Kyle?

-Hi.

Kyle Wiens runs a collective called iFixit.

They tear apart new technology

to work out how to mend it,

something they say big companies like Apple actively discourage.

Kyle, I've got an iPhone here,

and the battery is wearing down.

I charged it this morning, it's gone down 10% already.

And it's a year old. Why's it going down so quickly?

The physics of these batteries

is that they wear out after a finite amount of time.

It's a consumable, just like the tyres on your car.

You have to replace the battery every once in a while.

The real problems with changing the battery on the phone

emerged with the iPhone 4.

When they released this phone,

they included some new screws that we'd never seen before.

These are five-pointed star-shape screws

that we had never seen in all our years of taking electronics apart.

Apple invented a brand-new screw specifically for this phone

to keep people like you and me out.

They don't want us in here able to replace our own battery.

And I decided that that wasn't OK,

and so I reverse-engineered this screw,

and we started making and selling screwdrivers for the iPhone.

-So you invented the screwdriver that will now open this phone?

-Right.

So let's dive into this one.

So that's the screw - you can see it's pretty tiny.

Once you get inside the phone,

there are actually Phillips screws.

-Right.

-Which continues to show the irony.

They're only using these pentalobe screws on the outside,

to prevent you from getting in.

It's basically like a barbed-wire fence, isn't it?

To stop you getting in. But once you're in the phone,

you've got recognisable screws that you can deal with.

Right, absolutely. It's just a gateway.

They're preventing you from getting inside.

Once you're in, it's just like any other phone.

It's very easy to work on.

Apple told us that they work hard to make the most beautiful

and highest quality products and devices in the world,

using state-of-the-art technologies.

They say their products last longer, retain more of their value,

and are better-supported than all other products in their industry.

Apple wouldn't be interviewed by me.

They suggested we speak to tech analyst Benedict Evans.

I wanted to know whether upgrade culture masked a drive

to make us spend more.

Do you think the iPhone is improving?

I think we are still seeing really dramatic improvements

-in what these devices do.

-Is that really true?

Because I spoke to Dan Crow, who was a designer for Apple,

and he said that, actually, what's happened with the iPhone

is that it's kind of plateaued.

So, specifically, the new iPhone has a 64-bit chip

which gives roughly double the performance

for the same battery life.

It has a camera that can record slow-motion video in near-darkness.

It has a built-in fingerprint reader.

I talked to the people in the queue who were waiting for the 5S,

and I asked them why they were buying the 5S

and they didn't say because it's got

all these amazing new technological innovations.

But you shouldn't have to know that.

As a consumer, you shouldn't have to know why, erm...

It's not the consumer's job to know that something is better.

It's not the consumer's job

to have an opinion on things that they haven't seen.

Could you tell me about the iPod?

When the iPod was developed, what was the thinking

about having a non-replaceable battery?

If you make a battery removable,

you've got to completely redesign the device.

You've then got to put a plastic case around the battery

and then you've got to create a plastic socket inside the device,

and then you've got to create a removable case that will come off.

You've added, actually, quite a lot of extra just volume to the product,

then you have to redesign everything inside to make room for all of this.

So what you're saying is, there's a trade-off -

if the consumer wants a sleek product,

they're going to have a battery that's non-replaceable,

and that's the deal, and they're choosing that?

Well, I think that's a thing...

Is it not ushering in a kind of disposable culture -

the culture of the upgrade, that we have today?

It's about relentlessly buying the newest, the quickest,

the sleekest...and that that is, by its essence, the throwaway culture.

I think that's an argument that says

that, actually, we were a lot better off,

we had a much lower consumption, we had much slower lives,

when 80% or 90% of the population were peasants.

Erm...and the story of humanity's move away from peasantry

and a life expectancy of 25 or 30

is in part the story of consumption.

It's very hard to separate change and improvement

from the improvement in people's lives.

So you think it's right that we have a culture

where companies are prepared to upgrade things relentlessly

and that we throw things away?

Well, I don't think that's really the right way of looking at it.

Companies are continually struggling to make better products.

The reason why I can turn on a TV set

and have a reasonable expectation that it will turn on

and never fail for the next 15 or 20 years,

is because companies are continually striving

to improve their products and make better ones.

Consumer technology must deliver never-ending improvement

to sell to us,

which means we've now reached a pinnacle of obsolescence

with the mobile device.

But as technology expands to every consumer purchase,

the need to upgrade will become an inescapable fact of life.

The destination of a journey that began

back in the 1920s with the humble light bulb.

Manufacturers then had what seemed an impossible dream -

to engineer consumer behaviour

through planned obsolescence.

Today we live in a world of relentless, continuous spending,

not so much because we were manipulated,

but because we, the consumer, chose to be part of the project.

OK, ready?

Next time, how fear is used to make us spend.

I relieve the fear.

I relieve the anxiety.

How our deepest emotions are manipulated.

People tell me, "Wow, I want this car!"

Why? "I don't know."

That's good marketing.

I'll meet the men who've made a fortune

from exploiting our anxieties.

You've no idea how much money you've made?

I was lucky to be part of an incredible organisation.

That's one way of putting it!

What secret methods do shops use to make you buy?

Take a ride on the Open University shopping carousel

and find out what influences you while you're shopping.

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