Yesterday my coffee maker broke down. I went to grab a cup of coffee at 7 a.m. and nothing. It had simply stopped working. Help! How could I start my day without this sacred ritual? After an anguished internal debate over whether to call 911 or not — this was an emergency wasn’t it? — I settled down with a cup of horrible instant Folgers. Yuck.

This got me thinking: why had my coffee maker of three years stopped working? Were three coffee-maker years considered like 80 in human years? I doubt that. I remember that my parents still had their stereo system that they had bought in the 1970s, and it still worked. We had lugged that stereo system from country to country, spanning three continents. I remember that it weighed a ton, with massive wood and metal components. The speakers themselves contained enough wood to start a small housing project. They had been dropped, tilted and sat on, but they still worked and showed no signs of wearing out. I think my parents plan to be buried in them.

So the question that I had was this: why are things wearing out at a much faster rate now than they used to? Is obsolescence planned? If a product lasts forever, or an inordinately long time, how would that affect sales?

If you acquired something that ran forever, you wouldn’t need another one, right? But if your product was engineered to break down after so many hours, then you would be forced to replace it and this is where business economics and ethics clash.

Companies plan their products with a specific wear cycle. Many components are now made of plastic that are engineered to wear out after a specific amount of time. It would not cost the companies more to produce a product with a longer life span, but by producing said product, this would ­— in essence — cost the company more in sales reduction.

In the 1930s, it was proposed to General Electric that flashlight sales would increase if they built a flashlight with a lamp that only lasted through one battery change instead of three. It was the start of a new era in the consumer market — deliberately engineering products to fail. In 1934, the Society of Automotive Engineers proposed that more profits could be made if automobiles were designed to have a limited lifespan.

Even today, Gillette has manufactured a shaving cartridge with a blue stripe that fades, indicating when the user should replace the blade, regardless of whether it needs replacing or not.

With this new computer age, planned obsolescence has taken a new turn in the consumer market. Why give consumers a full range of options and software when they can be doled out little by little, forcing consumers to replace cell phones, gaming stations and computers with new ones in order to have access to these products? I can attest to this form of obsolescence — I recently acquired an iPad 2. In order to sync my iPad with my Mac computer, I needed to install iCloud. In order to install iCloud, I needed to have the OSX 10.7, the latest operating system. Because I had the OSX 10.5, an older version, I had to purchase this new system. The catch? I had to first purchase and install OSX 10.6, then purchase and install 10.7.

Then I had to install Windows 7 because my XP operating system wouldn’t work anymore with the new OSX operating system. The end result? A whopping $250 spent to be able to efficiently run my iPad. Was this contrived by Apple? Absolutely. This form of planned obsolescence creates repeat buyers as we are forced to purchase new systems in order to run new software.

But what about the ethics of deliberately creating a product that is designed to fail? With the creation of “disposable products” are we not transforming accountability into an obsolescent concept in itself? Disposable products have become a burden to the environment; to stimulate consumption we are consuming resources at a faster rate and filling our landfills with these “disposable products.”

We have become this “upgraded society” where we discard products for newer, better and faster ones — the byproduct of which is the creation of more pollutants. This is the dark side of obsolescence, if we are not careful, man will be the next obsolescent product, whether planned or not.