Make America Repair Again

Business Insider

01-05-2025

I think a lot about what will happen when my TV breaks. I'm not sure how old it is — I'm not its first home — but I figure it's got at least eight years on it. The remote hasn't worked since the pandemic. Whenever the TV does go kaput, I know I should try to fix it. I also know I won't. I would have no idea where to start, and there's no repair guy around the corner these days. Plus, new TVs are so cheap that it's hard to justify the time, effort, and money that would be required to rehabilitate my current one. Like a lot of Americans, I've lost that fix-it knack.
It used to be the case that people had limited amounts of stuff, and when whatever stuff they did have broke, they fixed it. Then the postwar economic boom and the "Mad Men" era of advertising, and voilà, stuff-palooza. Unlimited amounts of things now surround us, allowing us to take an on-to-the-next-one approach to consumption. When our phones, washing machines, or jeans show even a remote sign of wear, the path of least resistance is to replace them. Now, with President Donald Trump's tariffs threatening to increase prices and continuing concerns about inflation, that calculation may not be so straightforward. Repair is becoming increasingly appealing. The problem is, it's a habit we've moved away from — and one that may be tough to get back to because of technological, financial, and cultural shifts.
"This throwaway replacement mentality has definitely increased dramatically," said Nathan Proctor, who heads a right-to-repair campaign for the US Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy group. "We're just churning through stuff at a ridiculous pace."
If Americans want to avoid tariff-driven price jumps, they may want to put down their credit cards and pick up some duct tape or a screwdriver.
The long and short of why we don't fix things anymore is that it's easy not to. New is often cheaper, faster, and more exciting than repairing the old. That's by design, in large part, from corporate America.
Many companies have business models that rely on the frequent replacement of their products, said Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan. He pointed to Apple, which has a history of making its devices tough for consumers to repair (though that's starting to change on the margins). "The number of phones that they have to sell every year to keep shareholders happy is jaw-dropping," he said.
It's better for Apple if you buy a brand-new $900 iPhone than spend $90 on a new battery or give $25 to some small local shop to replace your cracked screen. The company spends a lot of energy on getting you to do that, via design, marketing, and other strategies. "They refuse to sell replacement parts to consumers, or they use software locks that frustrate repairs. Even if you're using authorized original manufacturer components, they leverage intellectual property law," he said. They also employ "relentless messaging about the value of newness" to make consumers feel like they must have the hot new thing.
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Given how good businesses have gotten at producing inexpensive stuff, from televisions to toys, it's often cheaper for them to make a new thing than to invest in a network of professional repair technicians. Engineering is focused on cheap production, and repairability isn't a consideration. Building something in the least expensive way possible is not conducive to building it to last.
"Repair requires a human being with arms and hands and fingers and skill and expertise, and building a new one often requires a factory full of robots, right?" Perzanowski said. "And so the scale just does not work for making repair an economical proposition in a lot of instances."
Some businesses have been accused of deliberately making their products hard to fix by third parties — they make manuals and parts difficult, if not impossible, to find. They might require expensive software plug-ins or program products to lock up if the wrong party tries to tinker with them. In January, the Federal Trade Commission sued John Deere over the draconian repair setup for its farm equipment, such as tractors and combines.
"Manufacturers have thrown up barriers that made it difficult," said Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, an online platform that provides repair guides, tools, and parts for thousands of products. They also publish repairability scores, so consumers know how likely they'll be able to fix what they're buying ahead of time. "I am always trying to say, how do we make it as easy as possible, easier, to maintain the things that we've got rather than to replace it?"
Shelie Miller, a sustainable systems professor at the University of Michigan, pointed out that supply chains have also become so complicated that even collecting the parts to fix something is a herculean task. "If you were to take apart an air fryer right now, it is virtually impossible to quickly get at all of the components if something went wrong," she said. "And so you'd have to spend hours potentially disassembling the interface of a very small household appliance just to get the circuitry not built or designed for anyone to take it apart later."
While it's tempting to place the blame for why we don't fix things anymore entirely on corporations, there's a pervasive cultural factor involved as well: American consumers love to cycle through stuff.
We live in a throwaway society that largely prefers to ignore the consequences of our constant consumerism — to the environment, to our communities, to workers. Microtrends make us feel like new is always better, so we don't even consider patching last year's jeans. Many Americans judge each other over which phones they have, and whether that device is the latest version. Buying a fresh thing gives us a little dopamine hit that doesn't happen when we revive something we already have. Even though that dopamine hit is short-lived, it's alluring.
"We have been warped by amazing marketing organizations that tell us that every single year the latest and greatest thing has come out," said Lauren Benton, the general manager of Back Market, an e-commerce platform that sells refurbished devices from phones to beard trimmers. Part of her company's mission is to get people to think about whether the latest version of whatever device is noticeably different from previous versions and open their minds to something that's been fixed up. "A lot of people have these stigmas around it," she said. "And we are here to tell them about the financial savings, the environmental savings of choosing refurbished."
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Even if people are willing to eschew the new, we've lost much of the cultural know-how around repair. Many of the local shops that repaired appliances, televisions, and radios have closed down, and those types of jobs have gone away. The types of skills needed in those jobs have changed, too, as technology has evolved. Plus, companies have made it harder for them to exist, instead funneling customers to their preferred stores or in-house options.
"The people who wanted to fix did it as independents," Proctor said. "And then the manufacturers realized that the more independents there were, the worse it was for their authorized programs, the more it was competing with their new sales. And so they erected a whole set of legal and business practices that attempted to make it impossible for those repair shops to operate."
The guy down the street who can fix your computer probably no longer exists in your local community, though he does exist online. People can mail in their devices, or they can find communities and videos with information to help them fix things themselves. It's good that the internet has endless resources, but it still puts the onus on individual consumers, and the repair still isn't as convenient as the replacement.
Nirav Patel, the founder of Framework, which makes repairable electronics such as laptops, told me many of his earliest customers were tech enthusiasts and DIYers. The company has also started to garner interest from people concerned about the environment. In Patel's experience, teaching people to alter and fix Framework devices hasn't necessarily been a skills question but a confidence one. "It's more of the mental barrier of seeing something like a computer as an object that can be opened, that has parts inside that you can swap out," he said.
Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of The Repair Association, which backs the right-to-repair movement, said we need to "demystify" repair. Just as schools used to teach students to type or put them in home economics and shop classes, electronics repair classes should be added to the curriculum. "This is the modern version of needle and thread, the modern version of putting air in your tires," she said.
Understanding how our stuff works, or at least having a fair number of people who understand it, isn't just beneficial on an individual consumer level; it also helps collectively safeguard us from getting ripped off or being in a situation where there's a severe knowledge imbalance with manufacturers. We are better positioned to critique and regulate technology when we understand how it works and its machinations. One way to learn how stuff works is to be able to disassemble it and reverse engineer it. It's a valuable skill that America, collectively, should not want to lose.
It may also become particularly useful in the short term as Trump's tariffs take hold. Many items are expected to get more expensive, if their prices haven't gone up already, and some goods may be harder to get overall. People have already been leaning toward keeping their things for longer, especially in the wake of the post-pandemic bout of inflation, and this may push them even further. The buy new versus fix old calculation is evolving as prices continue to creep up, compelling more of us to become tinkerers, even if reluctantly.
The solution for how to revive the practice of repair is complicated. We're not going to all wake up tomorrow and decide to break open the dishwasher to figure out what that noise is.
On a policy level, the right-to-repair movement is making headway in compelling companies to allow consumers to fix their own products or contract with independent professionals to do so instead of going to the manufacturer. The idea is to create competition and make fixing things less expensive and less onerous. Right-to-repair legislation has been passed in seven states, and bills have been filed in all 50 states.
"People are saying, 'Wait a second, what do you mean I can't fix my stuff?' And then they read about right to repair and they say, 'Hell, yeah,'" Gordon-Byrne said.
On a more grassroots level, fix-it clinics and repair cafés, where people gather to figure out how to fix their stuff or meet someone who can, have begun to pop up. There is, of course, always the internet and the bottomless sea of how-to videos on YouTube. Some organizations are focusing on education, too. In New York, for example, Materials for the Arts, a reuse center that gathers and distributes creative materials to local schools and organizations, launched a repair program in 2023 that teaches students how to fix items in its warehouse. They learn to reupholster furniture, sew costumes, and fix bikes, which can open pathways to a possible trade or career.
"There's a way for us to engage with students that are maybe on the fence about what their future is going to be and what they're interested in, and give them a hands-on lesson on just being resourceful and using their hands and learning about something," Tara Sansone, the executive director of Materials for the Arts, said.
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Our consumerist culture is perhaps the most difficult piece of this resistance to repair to unpack. It is easy and tempting to just toss our things and get something else. People are busy, and new things are generally cheap. It's annoying that many of our goods aren't as durable as they used to be. It's even more annoying to spend twice the amount on a repair than a new item would cost or lose endless hours down a YouTube rabbit hole.
When I posed this cultural conundrum to experts, I got two buckets of responses — they either told me that fixing things wasn't that hard, or they said it's the type of problem that's hard to solve. One person explained that I actually can figure out how to fix my TV if I give it a bit of effort, a point on which I beg to differ. Another said they occasionally pretend to be the fix-it type but acknowledged that's not the norm, which I will take as absolution for my future sin of tossing my TV. I figure I can alleviate some guilt by recycling it, though Anna Sacks, a New York-based waste expert who goes by The Trash Walker online, told me that's not really ideal, either. "It's better to repair a microwave than recycle a microwave," she said. (Luckily for my guilt index, I do not own a microwave.)
Miller, from the University of Michigan, said initiatives such as right-to-repair legislation help, but the cultural shift is the much thornier issue.
"I don't know what needs to happen in order to reshift our mindset to actually valuing stuff and saying, 'Oh, wow, this actually is a valuable material and we shouldn't just be throwing it away,'" she said. "A lot of it, I think, does come down to the economics of if our goods are incredibly cheap, it's much easier to have this consumption and throwaway lifestyle."