Crapflation: The Goal of Consumer Society

I replaced an old cast iron clawfoot tub with a new acrylic/fiberglass tub at my old house. It was a project that took several days of work. Rather than tiling the alcove for the tub, I used an acrylic surround and aluminum glass door. The tub and the enclosure and the door are all highly engineered consumer products. They're as light and flimsy as possible while retaining sufficient strength not to break during the installation when some care is used in handling them. They're light so they can be more easily shipped from China and distributed around the world. There's a sort of annoying cheapness that's very obvious when installing them--it's probably not as noticeable in daily use, which is sort of the point of that approach.

I don't wax nostalgic about how things were done in "the old days". The cast iron tub, for example, is just a primitive version of the acrylic tub. It's a consumer product that was cranked out of a factory in the early 1900s. Fuel costs were way cheaper and a more extensive railway network connected the whole country, so shipping a heavy durable item from place to place was relatively easy, even from Kentucky to my small town in northeast Ohio. There's no inherent philosophy of durability or repairability that informs the design of the old products. Lightweight, strong materials, like plastic composites, didn't exist.

With the old house, I'm on the same treadmill as everyone else in the consumer society. I want to get it done with the highest quality, at the lowest cost I can get away with. I'm renovating the whole place to sell it as quickly as possible. I don't cut any corners like a house flipper or a contractor might, but still, I'll choose cheaper materials or fixtures when I can.

Crapflation is built into the consumer/finance society. It's all just a crappy game.