Questioning the decline narrative of (consumer) repair

For Western societies, the history of repair of consumer objects in the post-war period is usually told as a story of decline. As David Edgerton put it in The Shock of the Old: “a new toaster retails for less than an hour of repair work.” However, the “Histories of Maintenance and Repair in Luxembourg” project has shown that while official statistics on the development of small repair shops reveal a reorganization of the Luxembourg repair sector, from mending shoes and clothes to fixing electrical devices and cars, they do not point to a general decline in the field. This is also confirmed by a close investigation of family budgets as documented by the European Steel and Coal Community. Contrary to what the story of the triumph of the throwaway society suggests, repair did not disappear, since Luxembourg households spent more money on repair at the end of the 1980s than in the 1950s – not only in absolute numbers but as a share of the household budget. The paper will compare family budgets and repair expenditure in (Western) European countries and investigate how much money was spent on the repair of which consumer objects. The paper will argue that there was no general decline in the repair of consumer objects; rather there was a refocusing of repair spending on a few expensive consumer goods. We therefore need to understand the history of consumer repair as an entangled part of the emergence of Western consumer societies.