A toaster in 1951 was $21, which is about $250 today.
I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.
Toasters are an interesting case study. I went on a tear last year after being fed up with every toaster doing the same bad job. I thought maybe someone made a proper toaster. What I found is that when you pay more the coat of paint gets nicer and maybe there's an MCU+LCD, but the guts and logic are identical. There is no good commercially available toaster today. It's sending a very loud message about how markets operate, and it's not pleasant.
Big part of the problem is the disappearance of brick and mortar stores, along with the constant bait and switch from e-rerailers making product reviews impossible.
That rave review was for an identical toaster with different guts, or with amazon reviews, something else entirely.
My biggest issue is with the lever. I have to push it down between 5 and 10 times before it will trigger, without fail. I've had this across most all toasters I've owned.
My second biggest issue is related to the same mechanism: the "pop" is impotent and does nothing to eject what's being toasted. The most I can hope for is that I can manually push the lever up.
The next biggest issue is with heating element distance. If there's anything that is wider than a slice of wonder bread it's going to get sizzled by the heating element. In the worst cases it causes smoke to be emitted for several runs afterwards.
Modern retail toasters, don’t seem to be able to fit a proper standard English sized, slice of bread - the size of which, I’m not convinced has increased over time - but rather, the toasters have been designed primarily with US sized slices (which I’m under the possibly erroneous impression, are smaller?!), as the target market.
Yeah, I know - I actually mentioned it in another comment here.
Even with Dualit, I would still only purchase from a professional catering retailer. Just in case, there’s any differences, and the fact that purchasing from a professional catering retailer, implies a greater level of longevity, if it ever did breakdown - for potential small claims court, reasons, in the future.
Regardless, Dualit also pretty much make every part of their toasters replaceable, for this exact reason. Hence why I think it’s one of the only decent toasters, out there!
Dualit 2-slice toaster: £160. It's held together with ordinary screws, contains no transistors, the timer is mechanical, and all spare parts can be ordered. It costs nowhere near $2,000.
I mentioned my Zojirushi toaster oven in another comment .. I use it as a toaster, and for a dozen other things. But it looks like they don't make the bread slice kind of toaster.
They are probably all made with the same guts from one or two manufacturers. Same with microwaves, nearly every model from $100 to $5000 is made by Midea. (Source: Wirecutter)
I think Dualit still make pretty straightforward mechanical ones. Or if not, you can buy an old one that's already been someone else's toaster for life and can now be yours.
My Sunbeam has a temp sensor. This toaster is at least twice my age, and it will likely outlive me. It's such a rare feature that I'm sure your parents and I have the same model (though likely a different year or style, as it varied by decade)
> I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.
Not if you buy one that is $250 because it has bells and whistles. You can buy a $250 dollar toaster that is just a toaster and it will be of good quality.
The problem isnt that long lasting, durable products no longer exist.
It's that they're no longer marketed for home use.
You can get stuff just as good as back in the '60s, for comparable after-inflation prices. But they don't sell them at Sears or HomeSense, they sell them at industrial or kitchen or office supply stores.
The thing is, if someone decided to stock that toaster on the shelf at Target, it wouldn't sell. Most people make so little toast that the words "duty cycle" or "slices per hour" are not even in their vocabulary. People are simply making purchasing decisions with a higher weight on other criteria.
Maybe, for the environment's sake, people should be buying and using appliances for 70 years. But do people actually want a kitchen full of appliances that are 35 years old on average? Probably not, thrift shops are still full of contemporarily made appliances that were discarded before their useful life ended.
I think that is some of what people miss. Way back when a cheap toaster at Sears was still expensive. Now you have hyper cheap toasters for like $15 bucks now, which would have been a dollar or so back then, you just couldn't get a toaster that price back then. So the cheapest item has drug the average quality down to it.
The reviews suggest this $250 toaster isn't any better:
"was hoping it lasted longer & would be better quality but was disappointed"
"All the coils do no not glow and It toasts unevenly"
"one side stops working after 6 months or so. I’ve gone through three of these"
"Bought two of these toasters both stopped working"
"Have to replace this toaster about once a year, one side will always stop working"
"Lasted me about a month or so and it no longer works".
"Died so quickly!"
I think this is a perfect example of the problem. There is a market for $250 toasters, but even for that price you can't buy a reliable toaster.
The site has other well reviewed toasters at similar prices, I picked that one because it was exactly the price being discussed.
Either way, the bathtub curve of product failure still applies no matter the price point.
Bear in mind that people on this site are using toasters at duty cycles hundreds to thousands of times higher than home users. 6 months of commercial use of one of these toasters could very easily be a lifetime of use for a single home.
my toaster is an enameled steel tray with a steel wire grille on top of it. you put it on a gas stove burner to heat up the enameled steel enough to radiantly toast the bread resting on the grille. it's tray-shaped to catch the crumbs so they don't end up on your stove; the grille flips up so you can clean the crumbs out before they burn. a handle, made out of the same steel wire as the grille, allows you to remove it from the burner without burning your hand, and folds in for compact storage when you're not using it
but i got mine out of the neighbor's garbage during our eight-month-long covid lockdown, gambling that it wasn't covered with cyanide or something
the electric kind you're probably talking about goes for about US$20–US$40 around here but i wanted to point out that there does exist a more reliable alternative
We don’t even call them toasters anymore in my household. Our Cosori air fryer has a toast setting that works beautifully.
It cost less than $250. It warms, bakes, roasts, dehydrates, as well as 10 other settings. It has 3 different racks, so I can toast 3-4x as much bread than I could in a regular toaster.
I’ve only had it for 6 years, but it has held up nicely, no issues whatsoever. I guess what I am trying to say, is that the product is the bells and whistles these days.
It's kinda just random luck I'd think. My toaster is about 15 years old now, just a generic Breville one. Still works fine.
I imagine anything that would break in a toaster is absolutely trivial to fix, but you are working with mains electricity so in most places you probably need a license to service it. Which just costs more than a brand new toaster.
I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.