Outside The Box

The floor of the forest is decorated by fallen petals of vigorously blooming mountain laurels, lifting the gloom of gray and green days soaked in air that wets your face without rain. A hummingbird feeds outside the kitchen window and I move slowly, trying not to disturb her breakfast. Beneath the umbrage of dark clouds and dripping canopy, the smell of coffee and toast brightens the dimly lit kitchen of a sleeping house.

A proper toaster is necessary for my morning ritual. I like the bread of many seeds, even though it’s supposed to be good for me. Mix peanut butter with honey, and it won’t ooze off the bread. Add slices of banana, and you have the perfect place for coffee to nest without jarring your stomach awake. It’s even low in cholesterol unless, of course, you substitute bacon, egg, and cheese for the peanut butter and banana.

The toaster on the kitchen counter is adequate, but its Chinese ABS and thin aluminum don’t bring me joy. I should have kept the old vintage Hamilton Beach from my parents’ house, a sturdy thing of chrome, steel, and melamine made in Racine, Wisconsin. You could disassemble that toaster and clean it properly. You could also walk into a Radio Shack on a Sunday and find a thermal fuse or spool of nichrome wire if it needed repair.

My disposable global economy Hamilton replaces a Krups model that betrayed me. I never would have expected it of Krups, but the lure of lower costs and higher profits promised by globalism has been more than most companies could resist.

Krups was founded in Germany in 1846 and made precision scales and balances for industry. In the postwar economic boom of the 1950s, they diversified into consumer appliances, and as late as the 1990s were still known for top-end products.

When I was in college, you could drive a crappy car, dress like a hobo, live in a room littered with books and pizza boxes infused with the faint odor of unwashed socks, but you were still cool if you had a Krups coffee maker.

When I bought the Krups toaster, I didn’t know that the company had been acquired by a French consortium in 2001 and began offshoring manufacturing to China soon after that. I never bothered to look at the bottom of the unit until the day I decided to disassemble it for cleaning and saw the manufacturing stamp. Suspicious, I forged ahead and carefully removed all the screws attaching the plastic housing to the metal frame. The last one would not come unstuck because the frame had been glued to the housing at the factory. The cheap plastic did not survive the encounter.

An autopsy of the toaster revealed the levels to which the company had sunk in its pursuit of profitability: thin aluminum instead of steel, plastic instead of metal, and a design that purposefully prevented disassembly and proper cleaning. The ghost of Krups was in the name and the price tag only, just like my beloved Craftsman tools now made by Craftsman Stanley Black and Decker Acme Coyote.

Annoying, yes, but a minor irritant in the grand scheme of things. A cast iron skillet makes a decent piece of toast without any moving parts at all, and a single glance out the kitchen window reminds me that the protective layer technology provides between us and the raw forces of nature is thin indeed.

Marie Kondo tells us to “Keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest.” I might start with the new toaster, but if I followed her advice to the letter, our house, like that of most Americans who did the same, would be almost bare. If our things brought us joy, we would be the most joyful people on earth. We are not. But conditioning has convinced us that we will be, so we keep buying.

I often get more joy out of fixing things than having them, but the deck is stacked against people like me. Radio Shack is long gone, replaced by designs that prevent consumer repairs and companies that threaten you with intellectual property laws if you want to fix your own tractor. Maybe it’s time for another visit to the Old Sautee Store for a nostalgic glimpse at that brief window in American history when technology empowered man but was not yet beyond his ability to understand and maintain it.

Those were the days…except for the poor sanitation, cholera, typhoid, smallpox, infant mortality, lead and mercury poisoning, and malnutrition. Come to think of it, this is a pretty good piece of toast after all.