Introduction
“Can he really be that bitter?” A reader of my holiday newsletter, years ago,
asked this. He was set straight by his
wife, who correctly construed my newsletter as tongue-in-cheek. That said, I really can be that bitter, especially after spending half my Sunday shopping
online in pursuit of a single basic item.
In terms of making well-informed
decisions, consumers have never had it better ... or worse. We are drowning in (albeit highly useful)
information. Read on for a one-way trip
into the retail Heart of Darkness.
No plastic!
My tea kettle died. (Long, painful story I’ll touch on later.) My wife suggested we try an electric version
this time, remembering the one we’d used when house-swapping with a Glaswegian family. I have now looked at several hundred electric
kettles online. Every single damn one of
them is unsuitable for one reason or another.
Most of them fall down because of:
plastic.
My wife concedes that using Botox is
unwise, but it’s amazing how much more passionately she decries the evils of
plastic housewares. If I wash anything
plastic in the dishwasher, I hear about it, except when it comes to my bike
water bottles. (I’m guessing that my
wife isn’t that concerned with my health,
which is my own damn problem, but she’s determined not to expose our children
to possible toxins.) We’re gradually
switching to glass storage containers, which don’t stack. This is inconvenient, but to be honest, I’m
wary of plastic myself, especially where boiling water is involved.
I’ve been unimpressed with the
electric kettles out there. Most of them
look ugly and bloated, and have these stupid plastic water level indicators
like you find on a steam iron. (Why settle
for the heft/swish test when you can have a cool
product feature like this?) Other
kettles don’t have the level indicator, but have plastic lids or mesh screens
in front of the spout. Others don’t
appear to use plastic, but what if there’s hidden plastic inside? This is the problem with shopping
online. Fortunately, when shopping on
Amazon you can look at the Q&A section, which is often incredibly thorough.
For example, the owner of one kettle
assured shoppers that there’s only a little bit of plastic inside the kettle,
and it’s up high where the water doesn’t reach.
She even included a link to a YouTube video of the product, where a
helpful pair of baristas give an incredibly long demo. That kettle looked pretty good, until another
helpful commenter reminded us that steam will condense on the plastic and drip
down into the water. Reading that was
the equivalent of being chased by the boogieman, rushing into your house,
managing to slam the door and deadbolt it in the nick of time, sighing with
relief, and then turning around to discover that this same boogieman is unaccountably
seated on your living room sofa, waiting for you.
The search became even more fraught
when we realized some electric kettles are insulated—they have the two layers
of stainless steel with the vacuum between them—and once we knew about this, it
became really hard to accept the idea of a non-insulated version. The problem is, all the insulated ones are hideous
and/or gigantic and/or contain plastic.
So I went to various non-shopping web
pages to research insulated electric kettles, and found dozens of people geeking out
over this topic without actually turning up anything useful. My favorite entry was one guy chiding another
for not solving the problem through simple ingenuity: using a standard non-insulated kettle and
pouring the water into a double-wall steel thermos. This person suggested that to do otherwise
was to damage your “greene” cred. The
next question/answer pair established that a) he meant to type “greenie,” and
b) I really need to find a better way to spend my time.
I finally did find a really nice, possibly
non-plastic insulated electric kettle—the (albeit pricey) Vektra—but it’s only
made for the English market. I guess there
aren’t enough Americans drinking tea to warrant a 120-volt version, or maybe
the Brits are still sore over the Boston Tea Party.
Perhaps the most exasperating user
comment concerned an electric kettle that didn’t have any plastic, but which somehow
caused its owner to get headaches. “I
returned it, and now I boil water in a saucepan, and my headaches have gone
away,” the paranoid blithering idiot concluded.
I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife, who (while agreeing
this guy was probably a nutjob) suddenly decided she wanted a kettle made
somewhere besides China.
Of course I was tempted to argue,
since just about everything these days is made in China, but as it happened one
of the kettles I’d looked at—a Chinese-made Breville which was made of glass
except for the lid—carried a one-star review complaining of a disclaimer
printed on the inside flap of the box: “This
product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer,
birth defects or reproductive harm.”
Curses! How could I feel good
about using this product, knowing I’m ignoring a possibly important warning? Moreover, this heightened my cynicism about the
rampant dangers of cheap, mass-produced goods.
(It also reminded me of the
sunglasses I bought in Hawaii last summer.
A bible verse accompanying the packaging stirred my curiosity, and when
I Googled the product name and the verse, I got all these hits about a lawsuit
against the company for failing to disclose carcinogens to Californians. I tried to return the sunglasses, but was
denied. Now, whenever I wear them, I take
flak from my family and from the little voice in my head. We call these sunglasses the “cancer goggles”
and lately I’ve abandoned them in favor of some Ray-Bans I found on a
riverbank.)
The search for a non-Chinese kettle
Consider Le Creuset, the venerable
French brand. They make a nice kettle,
but is it French, like their Dutch ovens?
Amazon, you will find, is very coy about where things are made. That said, when paying top dollar, many
consumers expect a first-world pedigree, and “Where is this made?” was the
first topic in the Q&A for the Creuset kettle. The responses? 1) “China.”
2) “China ... says right on the box.”
3) “I don’t know.” 4) “France. I love this kettle!”
Why do people answer “I don’t
know?” Do they not grasp that answering
the question is optional, and that “I don’t know” serves nobody? I see this a lot and it does little to burnish
my faith in the human race. Neither does
the response “France” when it’s a) wrong, and b) the fourth response. Did this responder not see the first three
answers, two of which were pretty definitive?
And for that matter, why does anybody
answer a question that has already been answered? It’s not like country of origin is something
we can put to a vote. Someone asked,
someone answered ... move on.
I searched Amazon for “tea kettle
made in USA.” I got almost the same
search as for “tea kettle.” Some of the
products listed under “made in USA” only seem
to be American made; many don’t even pretend (such as Breville). What ‘s the point of this search? A Google search was basically useless as
well. I did find some very specific
patriot-run websites like usalovelist.com, tea-kettles-made-in-usa.blogspot.com
(a retail venture posing as a blog), madeinusaforever.com, etc. They turned up a lot of products that might
have once been made in USA, but no longer are.
It’s kind of sad, the thought that patriots are paying a little extra or
giving up a feature or two to buy American, little knowing they’re still getting Chinese products.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t turn up a
couple bona-fide American kettles. One
was a funny-looking copper job by Jacob Brumwell ($399.99 from manufacturer;
$499.99 at madeinusaforever.com). What
do you get for your money? Well, for one
thing, the website points out that “Copper is sky-high on the commodities
market today.” I looked it up. True story:
it’s up to almost $3/pound. This
kettle, which looks like it would only make a few cups, putatively weighs three
pounds. That’s almost $9 right there, in
materials alone! The website also points
out, “Buy American and save jobs.” Fair
enough, but how many Americans are employed making $400 kettles? And how good are these jobs? A few decades ago I worked for awhile at an
American factory, and it was staffed entirely by Filipinos with green cards who
were making minimum wage with zero opportunity for career growth. I’m sure they were better off in the U.S.
than in their homeland, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t being exploited.
The other American kettle I found carried
this caveat (from madebyyankees.com):
“The parts are German, assembly occurs in the U.S.” I think I can handle that. And the price was quite a bit better: $9.86.
You might assume I was thrilled to see this, but for that price I was skeptical. It’s made of glass, which just seems weird
for a stovetop kettle, even if the glass is
German. Sub-$10 just says
“shoddy.” And I’ve had enough of shoddy
kettles.
(Which brings me to how my family
came to need a new kettle. Our beautiful
English-made Simplex copper kettle, the platonic ideal of tea kettle, was
ruined when one of the kids failed to put the lid on properly so it didn’t
whistle, and all the water boiled away.
The replacement, miraculously, came in the form of another Simplex
copper kettle my wife found at a garage sale right next door. Our neighbor sold it for practically nothing,
out of sheer bitterness. “It’s not like
the old ones,” he warned. “It’s a piece
of shit.” It really did seem chintzy compared
to our old one. For one thing, the knob
on top was plastic instead of wood. I
could live with that, though once you’ve enjoyed the platonic ideal of
anything, it’s hard to come down. The
big problem was that the lid didn’t fit right.
We went into this second kettle knowing that sometimes, randomly, steam
would escape around the lid so it wouldn’t whistle. Eventually somebody failed to notice a whistle
failure, and the kettle boiled dry, following which it would randomly drop bits
of metal in the water, probably detached lead solder so we’re going to go crazy. I can see why my neighbor was so bitter: this is a $200 kettle. Both Simplexes are in the garage now,
haunting me like ghosts.)
So, the $9.86 American-made kettle,
made by Medelco, has a four-star average Amazon rating, across 2,773
reviews. That’s a lot of positive
press. On the other hand, one of the
one-star reviews complained that the kettle “randomly shattered in my
hands.” That’s a bit more solid than
“gave me headaches,” but I still take 1-star reviews with a grain of salt.
Which brings me to the Q&A for
this little number. The first question
was, “I love the font on the kettle in the photo—a nice helvetica—but i hate
the writing on the kettle that i received—comic sans? can I trade it in?” For the record, the text printed on the
kettle, “Whistling Kettle,” is as ugly as it is pointless. Still, this seemed nit-picky for a $9.86
product. There were eight responses to
this question. The first: “that was a photo from a beta release of the
kettle. it turns out that helvetica will disrupt heat distribution and cause
the water to heat unevenly. comic sans works much better for this purpose.” I burst out laughing, and realized how
generally irked I’d become through my hours-long kettle research. The snotty response gave me a nice release.
So did some others. “We should get together and have a Medelco
Kettle smashing rally to punish this insolence!! I'm with you on this. I've had
a deep-seated hatred for Comic Sans ever since our local county used it on my
grandfather's death certificate.” And, “I
was about to buy this kettle until I found out the font was not the one
pictured. Ugh. The sheer nerve of tea kettle companies these days. Disgusting.”
After that mirthful interlude I got
back to business. This damn Medelco appears
to have a plastic top. I looked at more
Q&A to confirm this. But first I
happened upon questions about the kettle’s true country of origin. Two buyers contacted the company and were
told the glass is made in Germany, the lid in China—of phenolic plastic no
less, which the second correspondent helpfully pointed out is “corrosive to the
eyes, the skin, and the respiratory tract... and can be very harmful to the
central nervous system and heart; causing dysrhythmia, seizures, and even
coma... and if that isn't enough, it can also negatively affect the kidneys and
liver.” (You know what? The first four ailments were enough.) A third guy
disagreed: “I spoke with the owner and
met her dogs. The freakin' thing is completely assembled here in the US. The
plastics are made in the USA and the glass is from Germany.” Met her dogs?
Is that the gold standard for establishing one’s authority, or is this
guy just another joker?
Un-American, but still somehow okay
Finally, I found my kettle. It has absolutely no plastic, and is
practically made in the USA. Practically?
Well, here’s the deal. It’s made
by All-Clad, which is an American company that makes extremely pricey stuff. The Amazon product description of this kettle
includes this little tidbit: “Today,
All-Clad cookware is still handcrafted in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, with
American-made steel—the same way it was four decades ago.” Even a savvy consumer could be forgiven for
concluding that this kettle is made in USA, which it isn’t. The Q&A tally responses to “where is this
made?” are as follows:
- 3 ambiguous responses (“I do not know,” “Nothing indicating ‘made in ...’ & I can’t recall CoO listed on original box,” and “Where ever All-Clad is made!! ??”)
- 4 incorrect “USA” responses (“Made is [sic] the US,” “definitely made in the U.S.A.,” etc.)
- 10 “China” responses (the most useful being “I called All Clad and they said the tea kettle is made in China ... [but] in an All Clad factory, not sub-contracted out”).
Meanwhile, the All-Clad folks
recognize that stainless steel is a horrible conductor of heat, and thus use an
aluminum core in the base of their kettle. I have to respect their design work, which was
almost certainly done by an educated American citizen with straight teeth and
bright prospects.
My wife happened by, saw the photo of
the All-Clad, and was immediately smitten.
I told her the inconvenient truth of its being Chinese, but she didn’t
balk. I think she’d given up on the not-made-in-China dream, just as she’d abandoned all hope of an insulated electric
kettle or an electric kettle that wasn’t part plastic. Myself, I was so exhausted by silly Internet
research, I’d have settled for a stolen, Klingon-made kettle with phenolic
plastic bits and an asbestos liner. I suggested
to my wife that she head over to Sur La Table (or “Sur La Yuppie,” as I call
it) and buy the All-Clad.
(Is it ironic that, instead of
wasting the time and energy of a salesperson at a brick-and-mortar store, only
to purchase the product online just to save a few bucks, I instead wasted the
computer server cycles and Internet bandwidth of an online retailer before
purchasing the product in a brick-and-mortar store, even though this cost a few
bucks more? Perhaps it is.)
My wife, accustomed to my tirades
about wasting money, said, “I can’t believe you’re sending me to Sur La
Table.” I clarified: “Yes, but only
for this kettle! I don’t need any
backup grapefruit spoons.” We really do
have a set of needlessly exquisite grapefruit spoons from Sur La Yuppie. When my wife brought them home, I said,
“Where have these been all my life?!”
So, you may be wondering, how is the
Chinese-made, all-metal, non-electric, non-insulated, local-tax-base-supporting
All-Clad kettle? Well, it seems
fine. It whistles. It looks good. It’s nice and hefty (which has doubtless
earned it a few one- or two-star reviews because someone’s grandma struggles
with the weight). It does boil water
(though it takes 50% longer to do so than our old Simplex copper kettle). I’ve had several cups of tea and no
headaches. If the Iron-Clad gets
discolored, or the handle gets too hot, or it gets liver spots on the inside, or
any of the other pitfalls occur that I’ve been warned against by helpful Amazon
reviewers, I’m going to look the other way.
I don’t intend to do any more kettle shopping unless this one randomly
shatters in my hand.
So, how is your All-Clad kettle performing after almost three years?
ReplyDeleteWow, has it really been three years? Time flies....
DeleteThe kettle is fine. Slower than the old copper one, but reliably whistles and still looks pretty good. I'd say I'm satisfied....
Thanks. I'm still undecided between the All-Clad and the $300, made in USA, Saladmaster. Pitiful that it can't be made for less in this country.
DeleteThank you for this article. I was tearing my hair out tring to find the perfect tea kettle. I read review after review (many of the same ones you mention). I had a good laugh and now will go look at allclad!!!
ReplyDeleteI have finally found a great electric kettle that has no plastic parts. It's the Chantal Mia kettle, which you can find here:
ReplyDeletehttps://chantal.com/collections/kettles/products/stainless-steel-mia-ekettle?variant=39434266706081
Alas, it IS made in China, but at least it checks all the other boxes. Works great and is elegant and simple! (And no, I received no remuneration of any kind for saying so.)