Old Stuff Day

What the day is

Old Stuff Day is observed on March 2. No origin is documented, and the obvious thing to say about old possessions deserves examining before it is repeated.

Origin and background

They do not make them like they used to is half wrong for a specific reason. The old things still in existence are not a fair sample of what was made. The poorly built ones failed decades ago and were thrown away, leaving only the durable survivors to be admired, so any comparison between old objects in use today and new objects in a shop compares the best of one era against the average of another. This is survivorship bias, and it accounts for a great deal of the nostalgia.

Something genuine did change, though, and it is not build quality so much as repairability. Older machines were assembled with standard screws, used discrete replaceable components, and were designed on the assumption that somebody would open them. A washing machine or a radio could be diagnosed by a competent person with ordinary tools. Modern equivalents are frequently glued rather than screwed, use custom fasteners, integrate components into single boards, and in some cases pair parts to the device in software so that a replacement is rejected even when physically identical.

That has become a policy question rather than only a consumer grievance. Right to repair legislation has advanced in the European Union and in a number of American states, covering access to parts, tools and documentation, and manufacturers have begun publishing repair manuals they previously withheld.

Repair cafes, where volunteers help people fix things for nothing, have spread widely on the same impulse, and the most commonly repaired items are small appliances and lamps, most of which fail for trivial reasons.

How to take part

• Repair one thing rather than replacing it, starting with something cheap enough to risk.
• Find a local repair cafe, which will usually fix it with you rather than for you.
• Check for a repair manual before assuming there is not one.
• Notice survivorship bias the next time you admire something old.
• Buy the thing that can be opened, which is a question worth asking before purchase.