George Carlin used to have a bit about how he liked a certain type of car door handle. “I like that, don’t you like that? That’s why they don’t make it anymore - they found out we liked that.”
Lately I’ve been trying to replace several products I use. Sunglasses, shoes and some household stuff. Time after time, I find the product is no longer available.
The sunglasses are a glaring (heh) example. They are required at my job, and I buy good ones. So having found a product that works well for me I want to simply replace them with the same kind when they’ve worn out.
Not only is that no longer possible, but I had one of the most baffling conversations of my life at a popular sunglasses chain. After showing the store manager the glasses I’d hoped to replace, she told me they no longer had them. She then added, “You can try online, but if we still carried these we’d sell too many.”
“Excuse me?”
“We would sell way too many of these. People ask for them all the time. So we don’t carry them anymore.”
“Um, isn’t that what you want? To sell lots of sunglasses?”
She just shrugged. I’m guessing that the corporate masters of sunglasses calculate that they’ll do better changing models and styles every year than by continuing to sell what people actually want.
This seems to happen to me all the time. Products I like morph into variants I no longer want, and the traits that I liked in the first place no longer exist in their descendants. I understand companies feeling the need to improve, but the sunglasses conversation makes me think something has gone really wrong in the marketplace. We now live in a world where my last visit to a government agency, the DMV, took just 10 minutes, and they were helpful and got me what I needed. But the supposedly free market now seems increasingly reluctant to sell products that people really want.
So I’m feeling way more “oppressed” by private corporations lately. I feel like a liberal William F. Buckley, standing athwart corporate “progress” yelling ‘stop!’
