Nice rant, Kirk!
I gotta agree on toasters. My grandparents had a great one - it used
to click away to itself as it made toast. Beautiful chrome thing. It was
older than Methusala, and weighed as much as a '53 Mercury.
Now you're lucky if ya get a year out of one. The one we have now is
going on two years (it'll stuff out tomorrow just 'cuz I wrote that!), but
the couple before that didn't last very long. One only made it a few
months.
Appliances are not made to last any more. We bought a dishwasher in
'94, and the timer went on it. Half the price of a new machine JUST FOR
THE PART! 2nd time it went I replaced the machine. We had a glass stove
top go. The part alone was $500! For another $100 we got a brand-new
stove with all of the bells and whistles. The control panel looks (and works!)
like something out of the starship Enterprise. That'll be a bazillion bucks
to replace when it goes bad - so we'll undoubtedly replace the stove at that
point.
Anyway, how is it that 30 years ago in this country we could make great appliances
that lasted, while we enjoyed the highest per capita rate of national prosperity in
the history of mankind, and now we can't even profitably make
a #$%!$&* toaster that works? What in tarnation went so horribly wrong?!
-Stretch