I think some inflation will do us good. Things get pricier so people buy less, thus require the things they do buy to last longer, and we move away from the disposable everything culture and all its byproducts.
First, you can't reason from a price change. Things might get more expensive because there's more demand (ie people buying more), or because supply is disrupted.
Second, inflation is a general rise in the price level. That includes a rise in wages. If you 'want' people to buy less stuff, you need to lower their real incomes. That can happen in a period of general inflation, general deflation, or even stable prices.
When the price of fuel increases, the cost to send a worker from point A to point B increases. However the worker salaries don't change all that much, or at-least not uniformly.
Durable goods are still available to purchase. Miele makes vacuums, Samsung makes ranges, and so on. Most households do not purchase them because they value their money higher than durability of their goods -- it's a good trade-off for them, because the $1000 they don't spend ensuring their washing machine lasts 50 years instead of 15 can then be used for transit or food; or the $1000 simply didn't exist in the first place. We have a glut of disposable, nondurable goods that were traditionally durable because the durable goods are expensive, and what you can get working 40 hrs/week at a warehouse job has essentially plummeted. The replacement goods are a way of absorbing this loss of income by substituting low quality instead of fewer things -- a further loss of effective income would only reduce the quality floor lower.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I have a set of $500 sheets. They don’t stain (coffee, hair color, childrens puke, etc) and they’re soft as silk. They are an amazing set that we’ve had over 10 years now and slept in them every night for most of those years without a single thread fraying. I totally got them on a lark, when I was a briefly rich.
Every time I read this I think that an intrepid boot salesman would issue credit and sell the good boots for say 7 yearly payments of $10 and make a killing.
Everyone seems to love quoting that, but it's just a quip from a fantasy series written by a professional writer (i.e. no experience in economics/shoemaking/business/etc).
I hope that your intuition is correct, but I think the opposite is equally as plausible: prices are "sticky" so producers cut costs to compensate, exacerbating high disposal frequency.
The past few years, mobile devices and computers have been built better as device manufacturers compete on durable screens, water resistance, and more reliable hardware. A 3 year old phone isn’t trash like they used to be. And a good 3 year laptop has a few years left before needing to be replaced.
Cars too - car quality has accelerated since the late 90s and early 2000s, and because of that, a few less people are suffering the car price hikes.
