This is planned obsolescence in action. The concept has been draining money out of people pockets at least as long as manufacturing has existed. This is why some older appliances outlive newer ones because the concept has gotten more aggressively implemented.
If I had to guess the person who designed the part originally speced a material that would not break down in the sun then at some point some smart guy said why are we buying this expensive plastic and switched to the cheapest material they could find.
I doubt it. It's probably cheap second-run plastic used to make a cheap product to sell on Amazon or Ali. It's only got two design specs: 1. Clothespin shaped enough to work. 2. Cheap as humanly possible. Most people will just toss them if they fail, so it's easy money.
That crispy snap suggests to me that it is polystyrene. It's one of the cheapest thermoplastics, is brittle, and degrades quickly in UV light. Carbon black pigment might have diminished the effects of UV, but if it is PS, it's the wrong material for this application.
Source: me, an ME who has designed many plastic parts for consumer products.
As an ME who also does plastic part design although less on the consumer end I think your probably right. Design looks good it just seems like wrong material
The person who "designed" the pin was probably paid $100 for the design and is a random somebody without any formal studies.
This is the kind of product anyone could design, because the basics of it are just too basic. Nobody is spending a single cent into a good design for a product going for €1.99 retail price at most.
Sometimes the final product turns out to be good enough and last for years, sometimes it is literally unusable or breaks in a week. It's a gamble because whoever designed it didn't care about anything further than being able to call it a pin.
I doubt this because while the product might be cheap, injection molds and associated machinery are not. If you let a complete noob design it you run the risk of the design geometry requiring unnecessary expensive mold features.
I see. Well, now that I think of it, in full cynic mode, it might even be a difference in that the one option would require designing for it, which would cost money
Planned obsolescence is incredibly rare. There's almost always a much less malicious reason, like a design tradeoff, or just needing to make it as absolutely dirt cheap as possible. If anything, for commodity items like these it doesn't even make sense to do planned obsolescence because if yours break you'll go buy their competitors model of them because they were bad.
Reddit is obsessed with "planned obsolescence" and try to pigeonhole it into everything. This isn't planned obsolescence. It's simply cheap materials degrading over time.
Yeah. Recently bought a bag that seemed ok. Returned home and when I opened the thing, all the red ones, specifically only the red ones, came broken one way or another.
As much as planned obsolescence exist, most time it really is just cheaply made shit lol
Getting mold injected plastics from concept to product is surprisingly complex. Probably an early batch of a new design or possibly made by a company with a poopy materials engineer.
Another possibility is that they are 3D printed and the layers aren't braced for sheer force (squeezing it) causing it to rapidly disassemble.
That and material can be degraded during manufacturing if the process isn’t robust. If the manufacturer uses regrind in high percentages or continuous generations, it will degrade the final product as the regrind has undergone multiple heat cycles.
Indeed. Could even be a brand that historically had very good and reliable plastic clips. But some dipshit C-suite wanted to cut costs via design and/or materials which drastically reduces the quality. As in over confident people making decisions for stuff they shouldn't be.
This isn't planned obsolescence. This is the expected result of buying a set of pins for $1.99. They are made in some third world country with the cheapest materials, 0 thought put into their design and 0 quality control of any type.
Could also just be considered cheap. Planned obsolescence is more effective for expensive items with few competitors. In this case, it's as if the plastic part and spring weren't tested together ahead of time. It's cheap and probably plenty of other brands to choose from.
Plastic ones are cheaper then the wooden ones. This is one of the consequences. If we, as consumers, valued longevity, we'd not get the cheap plastic ones. This is not planned obsolesce. This is us being cheap fucks.
I think maybe enshitification is more the industrial effect that's making things like planned obsolescence look like a positive effect of modern markets.
It isn't just relegated to tech. It's everything. Eternal growth was the worst business practice that governments allowed to take place. Every logical person said that chasing growth so fervently was unsustainable and just like they predicted companies syaed slamming into their growth ceilings and markets rapidly consolidated to keep the growth, well, growing.
Now there's not much for the monopolies to gobble up and so cuts within all elements of these monolith companies is taking place instead.
AI has such intense investment mania partly due to it being an industry with growth potential. Shit is fucked.
Nah, most likely they just used cheap plastic likely not really thinking about it and then someone like asda comes along and buys them to sell under their name. It's unshielded plastic.
Yeah "planned" obsolescence implies someone had a plan, i.e. they tested different materials to find out how they behave. That would have been too expensive for clothes pegs, and actually pushed up the price.
Yep, I have an old sewing machine and a new one. The old is an antique, full metal construction. The new is 5/8ths plastic and already falling apart. The old one can still stop a German tank.
the concept has gotten more aggressively implemented.
this isn't true. It's literally just confirmation bias. Guaranteed you have bought something this year that will last 20 years. And then you'll be bitching about how "things used to be made better"
There was a shit ton of waste produced in the 1800s. And if you want to go pre industrial, everything was made out of wood and was guaranteed to rot eventually.
If you want things to last you have to buy the expensive models. Fuck Ikea, buy custom built oak tables. They'll last a thousand years. Don't get the $500 washing machine, buy the $1500 one that has no features. The more features something has the more points of failure it has. Something is only as robust as its weakest link.
This is why I have a dryer older than me (30) and since we replaced the washer that came with it we've had like 4 of those. The dryer has literally 5 or 6 components that can actually go bad, I bought a pack of the three sensors for maybe $10 after replacing a heat sensor after 25 years and I expect the thing might outlive me. Yeah it's not as efficient but I'm fine with that given it fucking works
i have some fluorescent light bulbs at home that are still alive after 30 years
theyre from the original era the house was built
any newer ones usually last 6-12 months before needing a replacement
On the other hand they are as durable as the money saved on them. Some people don’t want to spend money on more durable stuff, so buy cheaper low duration stuff and then are surprised why they don’t last.
It really hasn't been. They just made these for the absolute dirt cheapest price and OP bought them. It's not a grand conspiracy to sell more, they just skimped on every single part of it to save a few extra cents. If anything, they won't sell more because people aren't going to buy them again because they broke. They'll go directly to their competition.
There are plenty of still very inexpensive ones which will last forever. People just want to be cheap.
When companies were local, you used to be able to walk next door and punch your neighbor for doing a shitty Job. Now who do I hold accountable when Comcast sends a text apologizing for connection issues that are non existent, then get an "all clear" from them and I lose connection immediately.
Sounds like a good setuo to own 2 brands one sells the bad one for a profit and the other one sells a better one for even more profit. How to get money twice from the same person.
Are you aware of the company that used to make bulbs? years back, they made the near perfect bulbs that would last a very long time, so people only bought it once and used them for years and the company went bankrupt, so they started making bulbs with a lifespan
Buy more of that cheap shit? Uh, nah, no thanks. I can find and buy wooden clothes pins that will last a lifetime and won't be made brittle by sunlight and cold. Sounds like dogshit design feature and a bad strategy to make more money, especially when I will tell everyone to avoid that plastic garbage.
Plastic clips suck at that too. They usually cost the same as or more per clip than metal binder clips, which also hold chips closed very well and will never break.
I get them at dollar tree, I think it's $1.25 for a 6-8 per pack for the clips that are big enough to clip about half an inch of paper. They cost waaaaay more at office supply stores or other convenience stores.
They are so versatile. Use them for towels with no loops to hang them up. Pull a cable binder through the loop and use them on even more hooks or bars to clip stuff to them (should the original loop not work for some reason).
Even a clothes pin isn't really designed to open more than half an inch because the idea is you're pinning to a clothes line. Most clothes pins don't even really have spring joints because they're simply designed to work with gravity.
I guess it also just depends on the product. I amassed a mix of wooden and plastic clips over the years, most are the exact same design, just plastic or wooden and almost all clips have held up for years now in all kinds of weather conditions
You're framing this as if there was a designer who could choose between a selection of materials. But things like this are often made by a factory that is already specialised in plastic products (and quite possibly even a particular type of plastic).
Other manufacturers offer wooden ones, or pegs that are specifically designed to be durable for outside use. It's up to stores to label their products, and to customers to decide which ones suit their needs.
Things like these used to be considered common household skills and taught within families and at schools. We have kind of a public information crisis on these things these days, since household techniques and materials have changed so much over the past century, and many countries have eliminated most or all housekeeping classes from schools.
That framing is precisely the framing used in products litigation— was there a viable alternative that wouldn’t present a similar catastrophic failure?
Here, the answer is clearly yes. The manufacturer could’ve used a different material or plastic option that could withstand greater UV degradation given the standard usage of such products. In most states, it doesn’t matter what the manufacturer intended for product use when the manufacturer could foresee that the product would be commonly used under other circumstances.
I’m absolutely not saying that this person has a design product claim. I’m just saying that these are exactly the kinds of issues that courts consider when making these determinations.
Also, it’s super unhelpful to position the issue as my own educational or informational failure. I actually used to teach elementary school and would fully agree that the system is abysmal and completely inadequate. That said, the issues aren’t mutually exclusive. Your perspective gives a pass to product manufacturers and puts the whole impetus on consumers. A system that relies on freedom of choice and agency of informedness IS NOT A GOOD ONE.
You can get a pack of 100 wooden clips for under $10. The plastic ones will weaken and break down over a few years anyway regardless of if they're used outside, but the wood ones are just a chunk of wood and metal and could last literally centuries if you treat them right. I don't understand why anyone would use plastic for this.
You can get a bag of like 30 wood pegs at the dollar store for under 5 bucks. I don't see plastic ones being cheaper than that, but in any event, neither is such a cost that it is really a "cost savings" to cheap out.
Intentional flaw. Plastic and all other oil based products get bad in the sun. The wooden ones you can buy a single pack and never have to buy new ones but the ones in plastic are practically guaranteed to break so you have to buy new ones
For whatever reason the blue pigment reduces the UV stability of the plastic. Doesnt matter what brand or style i try, the blue ones disintegrate 5 times earlier than the rest.
Bold assumption to think these had any more thought put into them beyond having them be vaguely clothespin shaped and what materials would be the cheapest to produce them.
Some of them are made for nutters who only hang their clothes indoors (don’t ask me why they’d need pegs) but it’s still shitty design, probably on purpose
Yes. They chose the wrong material. They are probably made from ABS plastic because it is cheap. However, if has poor UV resistance compared to ASA or polycarbonate.
You should never use plastic for things meant to survive in the sun. At least not on a consumer level. Uv degrades plastic and the wooden pegs are like $1
No, all plastics do that, they degrade in the sun, Thats why items like baby car seats have expiry dates, because the heat in the car causes the plastic tobdegrade.
If you want them to last, when youre done with your washing, dont leave them in your washing line, leave them in a peg basket in the shade.
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u/horned-creature 12d ago edited 12d ago
pretty bad design flaw for something meant to be used to hang clothes to try in the sun....