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I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

As a child watching Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory,

I remember being amazed by the everlasting gobstopper, a candy that a child could suck on forever, and it would never get any smaller.

One of them would last a lifetime.

In real life, manufacturers seem to do the opposite.

They intentionally design things inexpensively,

with an artificially limited lifespan,

so they need to be replaced with a newer version. This business strategy has a name, planned obsolescence. The strategy isn't new. We know it goes as far back as

1924, when an international group of light bulb manufacturers

called the Phoebus Cartel agreed to limit the lifespan of bulbs to around a thousand hours

when they lasted much longer before.

These people used their power to create dependence, incorporating brokenness into the system.

Today's poem, though, was built to last.

You Try to fix it.

By Liz All.

You take the thing apart to fix it.

Its motor has failed.

...