The Baloney Slicer: On Things Built to Last and the People Who Stopped Caring

There's a certain kind of wisdom you only get from watching a thing break in your hands and realizing nobody's coming to fix it.

I was reminded of this the other day, shelling peas from Vi's garden on my porch. She brought over a bushel, even though I told her I couldn't eat that many. Her solution was to freeze what I couldn't manage, as if I own a freezer that isn't mostly hockey pucks of venison from three winters ago.

Sitting there with peas rolling off the bowl onto the porch floor, I started thinking about a zipper. Not just any zipper. The one on a coat I bought two autumns back from a brand I'd trusted since I was a boy. The kind of coat you expected to hand down to somebody's nephew. First time I wore it this season, I went to zip it up and the little metal teeth just gave up. Like they'd been holding on out of politeness and finally decided they'd had enough.

I took that coat to the shop on Main where old Gerald used to fix things. Gerald retired. The shop's a vape store now. I stood there holding this coat, feeling its weight, and thought: this isn't a zipper problem. This is a theology problem.

The company that made that coat, and the company that made the backpack I bought for my nephew, and the company that made the casserole dish Vi cracked in her oven last Tuesday, they're all the same company now. Or they're owned by the same people who own the other companies. It's like a big family reunion where nobody remembers how they're related, but everybody's getting a check.

There's a fellow who started keeping track of all this. Built a whole database, like a library card catalog but for who's secretly running your toaster. And what he found is that the story's the same everywhere you look. A fella builds a brand he loves, puts his name on it, makes it right. Then some people in an office building that's never smelled sawdust offer him more money than he can count. He takes it. And then those people, who couldn't tell a good zipper from a bad handshake, start taking slivers off the loaf.

Ben Cohen, you remember Ben and Jerry's, the ice cream with the funny names, he said it plain. You take a sliver off the baloney, then another sliver, then another, and pretty soon you don't have any baloney left. He ought to know. He's been trying to buy his own name back from the people who bought it.

Now, I'm not one for conspiracy theories. The Lindqvist twins have been feuding since around 1992 over whether the county fair was better when it had a pig scramble, and I've learned that most things people blame on malice are really just ordinary greed wearing comfortable shoes. But there's something worth paying attention to here. The people making decisions about your casserole dish don't live anywhere near the kiln where it's fired. They're looking at spreadsheets, not at the way the glaze catches the light. And when all you've got in front of you is numbers, the numbers will tell you to make it cheaper. Every time.

Three-quarters of Americans had something break or fail on them last year, and that's double the rate from when I was a kid. Double. We're not imagining it. The coat doesn't last, the pan warps, the tool rusts, and when you call to complain you get a recording that tells you your call is very important right before it hangs up on you.

For my readers thinking this sounds like an old man who remembers when a nickel got you a Coke and a smile, you're not wrong. But I'm not wrong either. The only real power a person has left in this arrangement is knowing who to buy from and who to avoid. Buy independent where you can. It's harder. Costs more. You have to do the homework. But the alternative is letting some office building decide your coat only needs to last one winter instead of ten.

Aunt Vi says the way you can tell a community is dying is when people stop bringing casseroles. I think the way you can tell something bigger is going wrong is when the things you buy stop being made to last. A casserole dish that cracks on the third use isn't just a bad purchase. It's a broken promise. And once you get comfortable with broken promises, you start expecting them everywhere. In your coat. In your tools. Eventually in each other.

I don't know how to fix all of this. But I know the zipper on my old coat, the one from my father, still works. And I think that means something. It means we knew how to make things right once, and we could learn again, if enough of us decided that a sliver off the baloney is still a sliver too many.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got thirty pounds of peas and a freezer that is mostly venison. Vi's already called twice to ask if I've started on them. She'll call again in an hour. She always does.

The peas will get frozen. The coat will get fixed, or it won't. But I'll be here on this porch, thinking about what it means that my father's zipper still works and mine doesn't, and whether that's a manufacturing problem or something we did to ourselves on purpose.

I suspect it's the second one. I hope I'm wrong.

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