Herrington: National Return the Junk Day

Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer

     I hate to bag on the New Sears, but it just keeps getting better. I had again returned my mower after the intown service trip which took 3 weeks, only to find out that the gasoline still leaked right out of the mower when I put it in. 18 miles to town, 18 miles back, then repeat to pick it up. This time they said for sure they would fix it. In the mean time I got an on-line survey to complete about my satisfaction with my service. Hmmmmmm.

     While I was there, I bought 2 flashlights, battery powered to go with my set of 19.2 saws, drills, and sanders. I pulled them out to use to fix the dryer door handle on our Kenmore $1,300 dryer that totally depends on two screws to pull a handle that is made of light gage plastic, which broke, and I had ordered the handle from the repairman who had come to fix the Kenmore oven which went on the fritz when we had the nephews and niece over for the holidays. Imagine 4 teens and pre-teens and no cookies at Christmas! The plastic handle was $30, and no bigger than half the size of the palm of my hand. 2 screws hold together a $1,300 dryer? The Old Sears would have used ½ inch lug nuts made of titanium. By the way, the flashlights flickered for a second and then died.

     Both of them did the same thing. Switch on. Flicker. Nothing. Newly charged batteries. But I don’t want to just leave this all at the front door of Sears.

     This is symptomatic. We need a “National Return This Junk Where It Came From Day.” I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way. There have been many movies made about how people are sick and tired of how shoddy the goods are in America, how over crowded the highways are, about the housing and banking and medical industries seem to be painstakingly gutted of their pride and quality assurance. The media has exposed it and the politicians have laid blame. No one actually takes responsibility, so I guess I will have to step up and take the blame myself.

     I am sorry America that I did not deal with this when it first started happening. We really first noted this when we could no longer sit on the fender of a car without leaving a dent. We knew that America had headed down a dark path as soon as we heard the word, “Plastics.” It was the end of civilization as we knew it.

     From that moment on, everything went low rent, bottom dollar, and that was the final nail in the coffin. Sure, I appreciate everything that plastic has accomplished. I need plastic. I’m not talking about the material; I’m talking about the concept. I’m talking about the difference between everything before 1967 and everything after 1967.

     At that critical moment, like Kandinsky looking at a Monet with the first real non-objective eye, like Hubble looking out into the transforming cosmos, like Derrida opening the history of the mind by taking Nietzsche’s philology to its logical conclusion, we finally come to that post-modernist question, “Who says?” In a way it is a Neo-Buddhist mind cracking koan that questions the most basic and fundamental reality. If those who are the experts can’t even crack the code and yet they are asking us to follow them, how smart can they be? Why aren’t economists super rich?

     I know why super smart people are not often very rich; they know something worth knowing that is more valuable than being financially wealthy. Maybe they know how to fix the junk they buy and so they make the money they spend count.

     But let me get back to my National Day of Mourning the quality we used to take for granted. Okay, we have imported a bunch of stuff that looks like it should work but is usually from China and it is often poisonous. That is something they have learned from the West: grind up a little of the trash and put inside the product so that you don’t have to pay to have it hauled away! It is the ultimate recycling project! Make stuff, take the garbage, repackage it, and then sell that too. After all, if they could package and sell cow dung in candy boxes in the 1950’s, why not sell all the rest of the crap to us in the 21st Century?

     But, I digress. Let’s say that we just simply take all of the stuff we have that does not work and we take it back to the stores where we bought it. If all 400,000,000 of us loaded up all the junk and returned it all in one day, we would be cleaning out a lot of headaches and showing the manufacturers that we will not put up with their non-quality looks-like-it-works-but-doesn’t stuff anymore. The news media would report that Wal-Mart and Sears and Target and K-Mart and all the other retailers have now gotten the message. Really good reporters would take the chance to see which things we most often returned and which manufacturers were rebuffed the most.

     I know this idea has a huge flaw in it: What would stop people from just cleaning out their garages and dumping their unwanted garbage on the front steps of the retailers? Hmmmmm. Okay, here’s the deal. I’m asking people to be fair and honest and healthy-minded and to not just dump their garbage on the front steps of theses retailers; after all, the retailers did not try to pawn off their junk on us did they?

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