As you may well know, Fairphone is a company that originally arose from a kickstarter campaign and makes phones that are as easily repairable, as sustainable and as fairly sourced as possible. They do have their issues, but compared to other big phone companies they’ve done a great job with this.
Now it appears that Fairphone is due to announce the so called ‘Fairphone Keep Club’ on the 14th of September - a bonus program as we all know it. You buy stuff, you get points for what you buy, and when you’ve got enough points you can redeem them to buy more stuff.
The keep club website claims that it’s the only rewards program that gives back to those who keep their Fairphones as long as possible, but judging by the listed ‘challenges’ it appears that the most efficient way to gain points is to simply buy new stuff.
Personally I’m a bit torn on this, due to the idealistic viewpoints I tend to judge Fairphone under in accordance with their stated sustainability goals. I do realize that is a much higher standard than the big-players in the phone industry achieve. I also get that Fairphone wants to build its brand identity and create incentives to keep customers and sell their products. But at the same time I can’t help but think that in the end that program is an incentive to be less sustainable, as it ultimately provides you with those fancy points as a psychological incentive to buy the newest and latest Fairphone product.
So I wanted to bring this topic into a wider community that may not currently be as deep in the Fairphone bubble: Do you think such bonus programs will rather help spread the idea of a more repairable, sustainable approach to phones, or will it rather serve as an incentive to artificially shorten a phone’s lifecycle by prematurely buying a new one? And more generally speking: Do you think advertising strategies rooted in consumerism and classic capitalistic company goals are compatible with sustainable product lifecycles somehow, despite not exactly having aligned interests?
Remember that to stay in business, they must sell something. Since they are selling something designed to last a very long time, they need to expand their customers and sell other products, or both.
Some consumers want to get new product regularly. There is reason to stop them. As long as they continue to make their products to last, the rest of us get what we want, and the company is more profitable, sounds like a win-win.
This appears to be an effort to convince people to try their products - good for them! My answer to your last question is yes. Capitalism is not bad - amoral or unregulated capitalism is bad.
The word “sustainability” is a joke when it comes to the Fairphone. In fact, they don’t even deserve to be called "Fair"phone, the moment they declared that removing the headphone jack actually reduces e-waste, all whilst conveniently starting to sell wireless earbuds at the same time. Fairphone are basically a sham company now. They may have started with good intentions, but like most companies, they’ve now gone down the enshittification path.
The company makes one bad decision amid a sea of great decisions and all people online can do is complain about it like it’s the end of the world.
It’s unfortunate. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I will never understand headphone jack shills…
Honestly… I can understand being disappointed with the decision to remove it. But it blows my mind just how worked up people get over it.
Vocal (extreme) minority that would still have cassette tapes in their cars if they could.
Wired headphones and earbuds were nearly extinct long before the jacks went away. Nobody wants wires all over the place.
