Buy into Buffalo: Handcrafted Toast Tongs

Buffalo, the once great industrial powerhouse, has been reduced to making a variety of hand-made items that would fit nicely in any church craft fair.

If you see this kind of handiwork at a church craft fair, you'd be lucky. Small artisan shops are nothing to be ashamed of, and I think you'd be shitting yourself with anger if the steel plants were still belching orange crap into the skies of S Buffalo and Lackawanna 24 hours a day.

These people are master craftsmen. Check out their website. But, hey, truck on down to Wally World and buy a plastic fork. That may suit your sensibilities better. A little research before you comment might be good idea. Just sayin'

People manufacturing goods for market is the backbone of any economy. You never know what is going to strike it big that will spur them to scale up, open a factory or employ new people. We shouldn't ever consider those self employed somehow second rate. The age of factory's employing thousands of US citizens is long over. Technology, cheap labor overseas, free trade, American's own unwillingness to support itself, made sure of that.

The character of the people producing these products, the quality of the materials and the finished products are absolutely impeccable. I wish them the best this holiday season.

Factory workers don't set prices and they don't set profit margins. They are paid a fairly negotiated wage for the extremely difficult and dangerous work they do. The corporate executives are the ones who exploit their hard work for personal gains. American industries have suffered at the hands of greedy executives and consumers who have lost their sense of pride in America. There was a time when everything in America was crafted with precision and pride but cheap goods from third world sweatshops and executives demanding workers to cut corners caused the quality of that craftsmanship to suffer.

I'd rather pay $20 dollars for a finely made piece of precision art than $3.00 for a mass produced piece of crap that came from some sweat shop in China.

I have decided you are all insane.

I only clicked on this to see if it was really about toast tongs. It is. I didn't even know there were toast tongs. Here I am, picking up toast with my fingers all these years.

the question i ask everyone who complains that the other guy is overpaid is this: if you had to do that work (collect garbage, make toast tongs, teach public school in a high-poverty district), what would you want to be paid before you'd consent to take that job?

I, for one, refuse to eat toast that has been handled with anything less than $20 tongs.

I bought my wife a sweater.

Arty Maillard reaction handlers...