Are Products Made to Break when the Warranty Ends?

Is it just my imagination and that of millions of others, or does it only seem like as soon as the warranty expires on a product purchase, the product ceases to work? It is almost as if the product knew the warranty had ended and it was time to expire. According to Giles Slade, author of Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, it is not your imagination. There is a business science call warranty calculation and it is a very serious science.

College business professors, product designers and company technical workers have been spending the past three decades poring over and developing equations to establish the optimal length of a products warranty and guarantee. Nothing is allowed to chance; their goal is to factor in everything, from thermodynamics, to profitability. They have established formulas which enable them to pinpoint down to the day and hour when their product will break, Slade says.

Some products were designed to fail just outside of there warranty because products that last forever are not very profitable. Every manufacturing business was created for one sole purpose, to generate a profit for its owners and shareholders. Products which are not consumable, which do not expire, break, or self destruct after a specific life span does not generate more sales. You can call the demise of your purchase, just as the warranty ends, technological Murphy's Law, but the truth of the matter is, business can increase sales by decreasing product life spans and they do.

No product manufacturer wants consumers spreading negative information and giving them a bad rap for selling crappy merchandise. They want the customer - product relationship to be a good one and building in obsolescence and reduced product life span is not good business, according to Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational. Loss aversion, the feeling consumers experience when their purchase stop operating is generally connected to two things, regret and memory, Ariely says. We are more attuned to losses than gains and because of our selective memories; we tend to remember with greater detail the instances when a products failure has something negative linked to it.

While millions of complaint letters for this exact reason fill the offices of the Better Business Bureau, Consumer Protection Agencies, and the office of the product manufacturers, Ariely would have us believe, it is all in our minds. They just don't build them like they use to. Today's products are guaranteed to provide you with service for a period of time, not a second longer and they give you exactly what they are design to do. So does that mean your product knows when its warranty ends? Well if not for real, it does so in your mind.