An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time
13th May 2012
Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.
Don Quixote loves this sort of thing, but Sancho Panza would like to point out a few flies in the ointment:
- In the Good Old Days, things were made to last and were simple enough that a reasonably handy individual could both make them and fix them. That is no longer the case. Most things today are made by highly automated specialized machinery that can do stuff that simply cannot be done by hand outside of a few highly sophisticated shops — and, because of that automation, can do it cheaper than it would take to do even a simpler model by hand. As a byproduct of that manufacturing process, most of this stuff is not intended to be repairable, which exaggerates the next factor:
- In modern times, the chief limiting factor of any manufacturing process is the cost of the human labor that goes into it — which is, of course, why it was economically feasible to automate it in the first place. Automated manufacturing processes cost a lot up front but each individual widget costs a pittance, and as long as you can do a manufacturing run that will allow you to amortize your initial capital expenditure, a predominantly manual process simply can’t compete. We get our tableware from Oneida, not Paul Revere, because in order for Paul Revere to make a ‘living wage’ he’d have to charge so much that only (relatively) rich people could buy his stuff. There is a niche market for the Paul Reveres (or Christian Diors) of this world, but most manufacturers are targeting the people who buy at Walmart, not Tiffany’s.
- ‘But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.’ Sure, we’d all like to have a world in which we could hand down our household gear to our grandchildren, but it ain’t gonna happen. Markets work, even when you don’t want them to, and people (especially almost-poor people who need to squeeze every nickel) aren’t going to pay $10 for something Made In America when they can get something that will do the job (not ‘just as good’ — that’s not the criterion; the criterion is do the job) for $1 that was Made In China. (The landed aristocracy in England got a similar rude awakening in the 1870s when people discovered that they could buy grain from America and beef from Australia for less than the ‘locovore’ stuff.) This nostalgia for The Way Things Used To Be that started in the hippy-dippy Whole Earth Catalog 1960s (and makes a mockery of the term ‘progressive’) is the same emotion that motivated the British upper classes to pass the Corn Laws, and the American upper classes to pass the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and the results in both cases was a disaster when the laws of the market eventually took their revenge.
It’s fine to yearn for the past, but don’t ever let it get in the way of hopping on board the train to the future, because somebody else is already doing so, and you’ll be left at the station. Living in the past is a rich person’s hobby, and if that ain’t you, then you can’t afford it.