1) Hyper-globalization, which pushes manufacturers to buy the cheapest components to lower costs. The failure of any one poorly made component renders the entire device useless junk which is dumped in the landfill.
2) Planned obsolescence as the corporate strategy to boost profits in an economy where everyone already has everything. By reducing the quality, product failure is accelerated, and the hapless consumer is forced to replace a device every few years that 30 years ago would have provided decades of trouble-free service.
NOTE:This is why you should seek out older stuff to buy or salvage and learn how to fix and maintain those products!
3) Consumers have been trained to consume, no matter how poor the quality. Tossing stuff in the landfill is wonderful because this gives us another excuse to go shopping.
4) Since global production and distribution is dominated by rapacious cartels and quasi-monopolies, they don't care about the terminal decay of the quality of their product/service. They know we're going to buy their low-quality rubbish anyway because we have no choice, and they know the quality of "competing" (hahaha) products is equally abysmal.
NOTE:I have been saying this for years, America is no longer a free market capitalist country!
Longtime correspondent Bart D., who coined the term Landfill Economy, pointed out a fifth source of decaying quality: resource depletion. It's not just hyper-globalization / corporate profiteering driven cost reductions at the expense of durability; it's also the increasing cost and difficulty of obtaining quality materials and components at any price.
