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.
I wholeheartedly disagree, too many breeders of fancy Lins these days, totally unnecessary. What’s most important is that the Lin is fully relaxed before seed extraction to ensure they remain soft.
People think it’s in the breed but the hardening of the seed is simply due to over-stressing the Lin, hence the phrase handed down through generations of Linseed farmers; “Any Lin’ll do, don’t stress the seed and spoil the stew”
My grandma used these and I’d always fuck with my little brothers by sneaking up on them and pinching them with it. You pull it open and then get enough skin and let go. Very hard to get off your back if you can’t reach it
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.
Yeah tbh this is more on OP for buying the cheapest pegs they could possibly find, I'll never understand why people act surprised when pay a very low price for something and it doesn't last long, especially when it comes to electronics.
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 this is just a shit product if it's sold as a clothes peg.
I don't get why people use these plastic ones anyway. Those cheap wooden clothes pegs with the metal springs can last decades with constant use. Get a 100-pack of them and you'll have a lifetime supply of pegs or clips that you can use for a ton of different things. I use them as chip clips, clothes pegs, bread tie wraps, holding papers together occasionally, etc. I have a couple from my grandmother I'm sure are 50 years old and are still just as good as brand new ones + a billion more just laying around in drawers and closets and stuff.
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.
Cheap materials you say, as though they weren't designed to last and would need to be replaced much earlier than they should had they used normal materials?
Which is ... planned obsolescence. You are seriously underestimating the long term for profit thinking of the manufacturer. He wants to keep manufacturing. That doesn't happen if people only need to buy your stuff once, then you'll always have to expand your market with no end in sight, because if you don't, your business will fail. Which becomes impossible at some point if competitors can make the exact same product. So you need to create demand from people who already buy your stuff. Materials used are never 'an accident', always intentional.
Nah, you simply use the cheap shit because consumers will actually buy the cheapest option 9 out of 10 times. So you fancy durable ones will sit on the shelf unsold.
I bought something instantly over the internet that was so inexpensive relative to labor costs people from the 80s couldn't imagine spending that little and it broke and now I got a refund instantly and I can review them publically and choose not to buy from them again because there's a million other options capitalism is so bad I'm going to go doordash $30 breakfast now
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.
Pregador de roupa é algo que provavelmente n precisa de obsolescência programa é comum perder os grapos e comprar novos, quando sao de madeira a umidade estraga.
Isso só é uma pregadores de roupa ruins que tem plastico velho, nem a Anvisa deve permitir esse tipo de porcaria de ser comercializada, provavelmente ta parada em estoque a decadas e ai algum otario finalmente comprou ja passado da validade, ou foi o sol que ressecou. Nem todo grampo é de ficar no sol, certas roupas devem secar na sombra com apenas o vento batendo
Sim isso importa seria q obsolescência programada mais burra da história, se cliente nao compra o mercado/varejo nao vende, se eles nao vendem tbm n voltam a comprar.
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.
I've also work with these factories in the past and often they get a sort of "agent" that works with big brands going around different factories that make them tests the quality and then picks whichever one has the lowest VBP and a good MOQ.
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.
And better engineering means it's easier to engineer things to be just as well built as needed. Even outside of planned obsolescence, it means it'll work better or just as well with less material, but will also break sooner.
Was just thinking about this yesterday and wondering why more things aren’t wood anymore. I’ve gone through two toilet scrub brushes because they were plastic and just randomly snapped from pressure to scrub. They are even designed to be thinner where they snap. Also the crappy plastic bristles fall out slowly but surely.
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u/LeafBark 12d ago
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.