The Parable of the Ladder

Today is trash pickup day in our neighborhood and amongst our other trash we’re throwing away a five foot wooden folding stepladder. The ladder is intact. It isn’t broken. But it has become unsafe because it’s just too rickety.

There doesn’t seem to be any way of tightening it. It wasn’t assembled with nuts and bolts but with a sort of ring fastener which, once they’ve loosened, can’t be tightened and now the ladder is useless.

The waste bothers me. I have no doubt that the reason that the ladder was designed the way it was is that it was cheaper and easier to manufacture that way. How much could have been saved? A few pennies? Maybe it was intentionally designed that way in order to sell more ladders. Planned obsolescence.

I wouldn’t have minded paying a few extra dollars ten or fifteen years ago for a ladder that could well have lasted a lifetime. That would have been good for me but, possibly, not good for the ladder manufacturer.

But I didn’t have that option. The only ladders I could buy were the ones being offered for sale by the retailers in my area and that’s what the ladders were like.

Now the ladder will end up taking up space in a dump somewhere. I wonder if I might have had other options if the need for disposing of the now useless ladder had been factored into the original cost of the ladder. Probably not. It’s a perverse system.