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Archive | November, 2022

58 years and counting

What a great story we received from a reader.

I graduated West Point in 1964.  We were engaged that spring, and my future wife (who is from the Hudson Valley) drove to the factory outlet in Rome along with my Mother (who resided in Newburgh, NY) and her Mother to buy this set.  We married in the fall and for the next 29 years traveled the world with the set.  Our pots have been to Germany, New York, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Kansas, Belgium, Louisiana and Georgia.  We kept the copper clean the whole time (polish after every use), and our two sons also polish their copper pieces.  We used Twinkle until it was no longer available and Wrights since then.

We damaged our smallest pot — we left it on a hot stove until the handle melted off — and finally tossed it.  We gave our square frying pan to someone in need just a few years ago.  The tea pot handle broke and we did not know about your business so we tossed it.
The rest we are proud to have and use.

PS – we also have another set of items from New York.  My wife’s twin brother gave us a set of Cutco knives and kitchen utensils (manufactured in Olean, NY) as a wedding gift.  We still have all but one of the originals and have added several knives to the collection.  Upstate New York rocks!

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Possible issue with Revere Copper Confidence Core cookware (circa 2018)

As a last gasp perhaps to revive the Revere brand, World Kitchen, shortly before selling or being acquired by Corelle Inc., came out with a new improved Revere Ware lined that seemed to want to bring together the nostalgia of the original Revere Ware cookware, with the more modern look of something like All Clad.  I present to you the Copper Confidence Core cookware line.  Yea, that’s a mouthful.

 

It must not have worked, because not too long after coming out with these beauties, the Revere Ware brand was discontinued.  That apparently isn’t the end of the story, as, turns out, these pans seem to have the potential to be dangerous. A reader contacted us with this disturbing report:

I have a pan that the rivet cap exploded and hit me in the chest. 10″ pan. Popped off ( sounded like a gun shot). I saw an orange flash.

He also sent us these pictures:

Seems that one of the rivet caps shot off the inside of the pan.  If it happened once, we have to consider that it might happen again.  Please use these cookware pieces with care, and perhaps make sure the rivet caps inside the pan are pointed away from anything living.

 

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Beware the blue postal mailboxes

I’m not sure if this is about another USPS failure, or a general commentary of our time, and the rising crime rate.  Years ago, after getting my mail rifled through and some Netflix DVDs stolen (that’s how long ago it was) I switched to a locking mailbox and only dropping off mail in the blue USPS mail drop boxes.  Later, I switched to using a UPS store mailbox, but I still drop my mail in the blue USPS mail drop boxes.  But apparently, those are no longer guaranteed to be safe.

Sigh.  I guess I’ll be more careful to drop my mail directly in front of the main post office, where I hope the mailboxes are secure, or later in the afternoon, closer to the 5pm last pickup of the day.  Not to pick on the USPS, but our post office has two blue drop boxes, one extra large, and one just large.  The extra large one is often full right up to the spout, where someone can easily grab letters out of it.  I’m not sure if that is a testament to the USPS not going a good job emptying it (or having enough boxes) or of a somewhat absurd level of trust of people that no-one will take their mail that is within easy reach.  After all, I’m guessing most people that use the blue letter boxes are doing so because of a bad experience with leaving outgoing mail in their own mailbox.

Anyways, we can always look forward to some entertainment from packages that go on unexpected trips around the world over the holidays.

 

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Inflation inflation everywhere (our prices will be going up Jan 1, 2023)

Everything costs more these days as we all know, and the supply chain pressure keeps building up.  We’ve held off as long as we could, but, as we start another manufacturing run to make additional parts, we have to face the reality of our increased costs; the cost of raw materials, manufacturing, shipping materials, and shipping / fulfillment have all gone up over the last year.

We will be raising our prices on average by 10% in the new year.  We are delaying the price increase to give customers advanced notice, and so that you can order parts at the current prices through the holiday season.

You might also have noticed we have different prices on our website, Amazon.com, and eBay (all three places we currently sell some / all of our parts).  We do this because each platform has different costs of doing business, and the different prices reflect those costs.  When you add up the cost of each part + shipping, it all about equalizes out.  For example, Amazon.com charges us significant fees that reflect the cost of free shipping to customers (in other words, it isn’t free, we are paying for it) but the customer doesn’t pay for shipping if they are a Prime member.   When you compare the cost on out website + shipping to the cost of the part on Amazon.com with free shipping, it is about the same in total.

 

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Customer demographics

I love random facts, and that includes breaking down our customer base to consider who is buying replacement Revere Ware parts these days.  So I broke down a month of orders to see what I could get from it.

62% of our customers are female
42% of our customers are male
4% of our customers I am unable to tell the gender from the name (i.e. initials or a name like Pat that both men and women use).

(I realize that my breakdown doesn’t particularly fit with the pronoun ideology that is becoming more pervasive today; it is hard to gather that kind of information from order names.)

The most common name of customers was John, representing 5% of customers.  Margaret, Mary, Laurie and Thomas/ Tom all had about 2.5% of the share of customers.

Almost all of our customers were in the US, just one from Canada this month.  Not surprising as those are the only two countries we sell to.  Here are the city’s and states of our customers mapped out:

The coasts are well covered.  The interior states other than the Midwest are pretty thin, but I suspect that has more to do with population density than actual interest.  I’d say overall we have pretty even coverage across the US.

Cheers!

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