If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Try to Fix It

I’m all for improvement. If something has a legitimate problem, fix it. If there’s a glitch, repair it. If you can add a useful feature without screwing up everything that already works, go right ahead.

But somewhere along the line, corporate America became obsessed with changing things simply for the sake of changing them.

Now that practically everything we own is connected to the internet, somebody is constantly downloading an “improvement” into our phones, televisions, vehicles, appliances, hearing aids, and even our thermostats. Half the time, you don’t know what changed until you try to use the thing and discover it no longer works the way it did yesterday.

And nobody asked you.

You bought the product because you liked how it worked. Then some executive, programmer, or marketing department sitting in a conference room decided they knew what you wanted better than you did.

It’s like walking into your neighborhood Wawa one morning and discovering they flipped the entire store around overnight. The coffee is where the chips used to be. The creamers are on the other side of the building. The register is facing backward, and the hoagie screen now requires six extra steps because somebody at corporate decided it created a “better customer experience.”

No, it didn’t. I just want my coffee.

Imagine walking into a supermarket and finding out the coffee is no longer in the coffee aisle. Somebody decided it made more sense next to the paper towels. You ask an employee where it went, and they tell you, “We’ve updated the store to serve you better.”

How is making me hunt for something serving me better?

I recently went through this with my hearing aids. They are excellent, AI-driven hearing aids, and I love almost everything about them. They have a special AI mode that cuts down background noise, and it works very well. The downside is that the AI mode uses much more power and drains the batteries faster.

That was fine when I controlled it. I could turn it on when I needed it and shut it off when I didn’t.

Then the manufacturer quietly downloaded an update that made the hearing aids switch into AI mode automatically whenever they detected loud noise.

It probably sounded brilliant in a corporate meeting.

In real life, I could be shaving, cutting the grass, or running a power tool in the morning, and my hearing aids would automatically switch into the battery-draining AI mode without my even knowing it. By late afternoon, my batteries could be dead.

So the company took a feature I liked, removed my control over it, and turned it into a problem. I eventually had to go back to the hearing specialist and have the hearing aids reprogrammed to work the way they did when I bought them.

That is not an improvement. That is fixing something that wasn’t broken—and breaking it in the process.

It happens everywhere. Your phone updates, and suddenly the button you’ve used for five years is somewhere else. Your smart television rearranges the menu and adds more advertisements. Your car changes how a safety feature operates. A computer program gets a fancy new design, but now a task that once took one click requires five.

Even appliances are getting ridiculous. A washing machine shouldn’t need my email address. A refrigerator doesn’t need to send me notifications. I shouldn’t have to create an account, accept a privacy policy, and download an app just to make toast.

Companies call all of this innovation. Sometimes it is. But different does not automatically mean better, and adding more technology does not always make a product more useful. Sometimes it simply makes the product more complicated, less reliable, and harder for the owner to control.

There’s also a bigger question: Do we actually own anything anymore?

If I paid for a product because I liked its features and the way it operated, why should the manufacturer be allowed to change it afterward without asking me? I bought the product that existed that day—not whatever some corporate committee might decide to turn it into six months later.

Fix safety problems. Repair security weaknesses. Correct legitimate defects. But if you want to change how my product works, tell me what you’re changing and give me the choice to accept it, reject it, or go back to the old version.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. We shouldn’t have to relearn how to use everything we own every six months because somebody at corporate needed to justify their job.

Sometimes the smartest improvement is knowing when to leave something alone.

If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.