Am I the only person left in the Western hemisphere under the age of 60 who doesn't want geegaws and doodads on small consumer electric appliances? The recent and untimely demise of my coffee maker and toaster oven have thrust me back into the aisles of Sears, Home Depot, Best Buy, Bed Bath and Beyond, and way beyond. I look at all the buttons and panels and timers and filters and I just think "these are going to break." I really resent paying for overblown features just to get heavy-duty plastic and decent engineering.
You know what I want? I want a vacation at a resort hotel with cable and room service and nothing breaking down, and a two-hour massage at 3 p.m. OK, OK, if I can't have that, I just want a coffee maker that doesn't burn coffee or spill water all over. No timer. No auto set. No clock. No glass carafe that shatters or cracks if you wash it with tepid water. I do want one that has a sneak-a-cup mode and a decent handle that won't fall off for under $50. Is that so hard? Is it?
And I want a toaster oven with knobs that won't fall off or crack that will toast my morning bagel. No convection oven. No combo toaster/toaster oven with slots on top. No rack to roast a chicken and a size to match. Just a simple toaster oven.
Back in my day, we used to toast our bagels on a stick over the fire...
All right, I'll stop being a curmudgeon, but for pete's sake, aren't there people out there who don't want automatic everything?
5 comments:
You are not alone. Man are you not alone.
They must think that if an item does 8,000+ things and is covered in blinking LED's it makes it more worth having and therefore being idiot people we'll want to own it. We don't even have a choice anymore. They are ALL awful.
Take for instance when my toaster died about two months ago. All I wanted was a toaster that would make good toast, from slices of plain old bread.
Did I want to spend $100 on an over-priced Kitchen-Aid toaster? No. After browsing for 30 minutes I bought the most seemingly plain, cheapest toaster Meijer's carried for $14. It was enormous! The plastic shroud that covered the toaster compartments was huge and oh so cheap and oh so ugly and oh so poorly made.
What did I end up doing? I returned the toaster to Meijer's the next day then went to the local 2nd hand store and bought TWO used toasters that both worked and were in beautiful condition. One was $4, the other $6. On top of that, they were the right size and all shiny chrome to boot. Straight from the 60's and 70's. They have a dial for the darkness you desire and a lever you push down to start the toast. Easy! These items are 40+ years old and they still work like new. I put one in storage in case the one I am using breaks.
I have also bought my humidifiers on e-bay. They too are 40-50 years old and work great. Several newer humidifiers I have bought all died and the cost of the required filters was enough to send me to the poor house.
When will Americans start demanding quality and refusing to buy items whose shelf-life is pre-determined with "planned obsolescence"?
My apologies for the rant, but it has gotten almost impossible to buy a plain, no-frills version of anything.
I don't even like coffee makers. I bought a percolator 25-30 years ago and make my coffee on the stove. If I want a cup later I nuke it. I don't like the idea of the coffee slowly carmelizing on that heat plate.
And I bought a neat toaster from Meijers when I finally retired my '70's toaster/oven. There was nothing wrong with it, I just got tired of it and gave it away. The toaster I got is a basic square aluminum shape with the intaglio word TOASTon the side. It has the basic dial and push-down lever, albeit not as solid as the old chrome models.
Didn't Dilbert have a toaster with a disk drive. That makes as much sense.
I've had luck with the Braun KF400-BLK Aromaster 10-Cup Coffeemaker. It only had an on/off switch, howwaabout that? I'm actually my second one, but my first one lasted me through college, about 6 moves and made 10 years of good coffee. I don't know if the carafe is glass or not, I've never had one break before.
OK, I'm glad it isn't just me. Thanks for the comments, everyone! I ended up buying a Braun Aromaster (KF420B) coffeemaker, the simplest thing since sliced bread. Twenty bucks. I had a delicious hot cup of coffee this morning. Mmmmmm, simplicity.
The toaster oven is another story. I'll post about it. Sigh.
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