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Goodbye First Class Package rate, hello USPS Ground Advantage

By on September 11, 2023 in RevereWareParts.com

Unbeknownst to us, the USPS revised their shipping types in the last month.  Out is the First Class Package rate and in is USPS Ground Advantage shipping, which is slightly different, but similar.

According to USPS, USPS Ground Advantage will offer lower prices than the existing First-Class Package Service, which is currently the USPS’s most popular package delivery option.

The First-Class Package Service was previously limited to lightweight packages up to 15.999 ounces. Still, in January 2023, USPS redefined it by removing Retail Ground and Parcel Select Ground and expanding the weight limit to 70 pounds. In July 2023, USPS Ground Advantage will replace Retail Ground, Parcel Select Ground, and First-Class Package Service.

Whit USPS Ground Advantage, the price for shipping items weighing up to 15.999 oz is determined by both their weight (rounded up to 4 oz, 8 oz, 12 oz, and 15.999 oz) and the distance to their destination. For packages weighing more than 15.999 oz, the shipping fee is based on a per-pound rate up to a maximum weight of 70 lbs (rounded up).

However, some optional features currently available with First-Class Package Service will not be included in USPS Ground Advantage. Customers will no longer be able to use Certificate of Mailing and Certified Mail with USPS Ground Advantage, but these services will still be offered with alternative products such as Priority Mail.

USPS Ground Advantage aims to offer faster delivery times and more reliable tracking information, and it will be available for both commercial and residential customers. The new USPS Ground Advantage service will be cheaper, faster, and better at helping you schedule shipments and manage customer returns.

Unfortunately, our shipping cost calculator for our website order system requires us to choose specific shipping tiers to support, and once the USPS system was no longer returning quotes for the First Class Package rate, our system defaulted to the next higher rate, Priority Mail.

This resulted in shipping costs about twice as expensive, but also meant packages got there faster.

We discovered the error after a couple of weeks and updated everything to have the proper support for the new Ground Advantage rate a week ago, so everything is back where it should be.

First Class Package

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Order shipping email issue (ongoing as of 7/9/23)

By on July 7, 2023 in RevereWareParts.com

Last week we did an update of the key software that runs our website and store to bring it up to date with the latest security patches.  Unfortunately this caused an issue that prevented orders from being sent to our fulfillment contractor, which we discovered this week on Independence day.  Our website operators believed they fixed the issue the following day.

As of Friday we thought the orders had not been shipped, but we discovered today that the orders have been shipped, but our system has not been getting the shipping acknowledgements, and thus has not been sending out the emails to inform customers their order has shipped, and the tracking information.

To those with outstanding orders, we apologize for the inconvenience this is causing. We are working to get this resolved as quickly as possible.

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Be sure to give us your correct email address in our contact form

By on January 10, 2023 in RevereWareParts.com

There have been a rash of bounces backs lately for customer service emails people have sent me.  I feel bad because they are probably thinking we didn’t answer their request.  Please take care to enter your proper email address when filling out our contact form.  So I’ll post the answers here and clear my conscience. 🙂

Jane asks:

I am wondering what the weight is of RW muffins pans ? I have seen for sale the 2516 h90A – and other pans with a different h number- I am looking for an 18/10 SS pan – your help in figuring out the weight of the pans I have seen – their numbers and what they mean would be appreciated.

I’ve never owned a Revere Ware muffin pan so unfortunately have no idea of their weight.  I also have no idea about the numbers off the top of my head but I am always willing to take a look if you send me a pciture; perhaps it will spark something.

Marsia asks:

My Revereware copper bottom 10″ skillet has a 1/2″ spline. I have no idea what year it was made.
The handle has been missing for years, so I don’t know if it had one or two screws,
What size should I order to replace the handle.

I would need a picture of the skillet to better assess.  I can’t recall every seeing a 1/2″ spline.

Renilda asks:

I have an old Revere Ware Dutch oven. The handle on one side fell off. I have the handle, bracket, and screw, but can’t figure out how to get it to stay back on. Also have been unsuccessful in finding any videos of how to do it. Can you help? Thank you!
The handle brackets were likely spot welded on.  The only way to repair them would be to take them
to a welder or machine shop and ask them to weld or braze the brackets back on.
Here is our information on that type of repair:
Sandi asks:
I’m sitting here with a tape measure and my handle off my small pot (1970 wedding gift) and I’m 99% positive I need the screws (hardware) for the smaller handle. But! I want to be positive so, could you please tell me what the heck a ‘spline’ is? Thank you! Sandi
The spline is the metal piece that the two handle halves attach to.
It is the long and thin part that comes off the side of the pot.  The small handles
go onto a spline that is 3/8” “tall” which is the measurement from the bottom side
of that metal piece (toward the stove) to the top side (towards the ceiling).
Any other size (5/8” or 3/4”) will require the M/L/XL hardware set.
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Merry Christmas and Happy Revere Ware

By on December 27, 2022 in RevereWareParts.com

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, or other holiday celebration.  It has been another banner year for Revere Ware lovers.  If our sales for Revere Ware replacement parts are any indication, interest in Revere Ware continues to be elevated from pre-pandemic levels.  2022 has been about the same as 2020, which is to say, not as good as 2021 but significantly better than 2019.  While Revere Ware as an official brand is dead, Revere Ware as a cherished brand is growing.  It’s like the old adage, “Rock is Dead. Long Live Rock!”

In the spirit of Christmas, I came across this display of lids from an eBay listing.  Doesn’t it remind you of a Christmas tree?

Happy Holidays everyone!

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

By on November 7, 2022 in RevereWareParts.com

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

By on November 1, 2022 in RevereWareParts.com

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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Comparing 2022 with prior years and what that tells us

By on October 2, 2022 in RevereWareParts.com

It’s been a crazy few years, no question.  The pandemic boosted peoples interest in cooking and our business benefited from that.  Now, there has been a consistent growth in interest in vintage cookware products for the last decade we’ve been selling Revere Ware parts; we averaged 10% revenue growth between 2010 and 2019.  Then, in 2020, we saw a 35% revenue growth.  2021 retained the higher revenue level of 2020 and added another 11%.  So far this year, we are down 10.5% from last year.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the lifestyle changes the pandemic saw (like working from home) would stick around for the long term.  Given the amount of activity this year has seen (people are doing lots of activities and spending plenty of time away from home) I would have thought we’d see a steeper revenue drop over last year, but that isn’t the case.  The winter season sees our strongest sales, so that will tell us more.  For now, it seems like people’s interest in cooking is sticking around.

As another data point, our website traffic is down about 10% from last year.  While there are lots of things that affect website traffic (like Google changing its algorithms which it does several times a year), taken as face value this is in line with the slightly lower interest we have seen.  Our website traffic levels had also been heavily inflated by the pandemic, as you can see here.

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A tale of two typos

By on June 14, 2022 in RevereWareParts.com

There is a lot of information I’ve compiled on this website, and I do occasionally make typos.  Sometimes readers are kind enough to point them out, like reader Terry.

PS:  I believe the third paragraph; first line, of the Cleaning & Care Information page has a spelling error:  buffing oils arc likely
Also, under CARE OF REVERE WARE, the first paragraph ends with:  We recommend
and nothing after.
Very helpful, and easily fixed.  On the other hand, I also sometimes receive comments like this:
Please do correct the incorrect use of it’s. It’s should not be used unless you mean “it is.”
Yes, that’s all the information they gave me.  If you do find a typo, please let me know the specific page it is on. 🙂
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Best of RevereWareParts Blog: October 2010 How We Make Cookware Parts

By on January 10, 2022 in RevereWareParts.com

Sometimes people mistake us for a big company and get upset when our parts aren’t perfect.  So coming across this article from 2010 it seems like a good reminder of how and why we do this.

About one out of every several hundred customers that buys a lid/cover knob from us complains that it didn’t come with a screw.  The reason is that, as far as we can tell, Revere Ware pot/pan covers had a permanently attached screw since day one.  I think the 0.3% of people who have covers where this is not true probably have a non Revere Ware cover that someone put a Revere Ware knob on, or their screw broke off and their lid was retrofitted to use a separate screw, as we outline here.

This issue is valuable as it highlights the process we have been going through to create replacement parts for Revere Ware cookware.  It seems that replacement parts have not been available from Revere Ware (now World Kitchen LLC) since 1986, according to World Kitchen’s website.  This has created not only a lack of parts for customers, but lack of unused parts for us to model ours after.

To create replacement parts, we attempt to find a wide enough sample of the cookware and parts to represent all possible variations that exist out there in the world.  It is not always easy and often times all we can find are parts that are well used and not exactly in their original shape.

With knobs in particular, there is a wide variation in the length of the screw and the actual knobs themselves have had at least 10 variations over the years, some with metal inserts, including aluminum and brass, some without, and with varying depths of screw holes.  With handles, there seems to be slight variations in hole separation.

Overall, if the number of complaints about problems is any indication, we’ve done a pretty good job; we receive about 2 or 3 complaints for every hundred parts we sell.  In many cases, a little bit of do-it-yourself effort, like widening holes in the metal part of a handle, can solve the problem.

Probably the largest hurdle and the reason people are upset when their parts don’t fit, is that we are often confused with the Revere Ware company, and as such, people expect the parts to work perfectly, unaware of the trouble we have had to go through to actually create suitable replacement parts.  While our name helps people understand exactly what we provide, people seem to skip past the numerous disclaimers on our site that we are not affiliated with the Revere Ware company or brand.

So, just to clarify, we are not the company that made the cookware and we have had no help from them in creating these parts.  You can find World Kitchen LLC, which owns the Revere Ware brand, here.

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Solving problems, advanced edition

By on December 6, 2021 in Amazon, DIY, RevereWareParts.com

I must say, the customers that are brave enough to purchase parts from a small independent website like ours seem to be made of heartier stock than their brethren that quietly retreat to the safety of Amazon.com for such purchases.

We know for a fact that those of you that purchase from us directly seem to be better at reading, as you rarely ever return items just because you didn’t fully read our product pages and ordered the wrong item.  On some products on Amazon.com, returns approach 15% of purchases; on our site we sit comfortably south of 1% of total orders being returned.  Even the characters that buy from us on eBay hardly ever return items, so this is definitely an Amazon phenomenon (phenomazon?).

But, there are some Amazon.com returns that are truly based on difficulty with our parts.  Granted, trying to replicate a line of replacement parts on a shoestring that was once developed by a huge corporation is bound to result in some imperfections.  But I give you our website customers credit, you seem to either figure it out or contact us for help (which we dutifully supply in droves) and rarely ever give up and just return the darn things, like your cohorts at Amazon are more likely than not to do if there is an issue.

So we’ve made some changes to try and engage with Amazon.com customers more; we now put stickers on every part with our Gmail address to make it easy for people to contact us for help, and we contact every customer who returns a product (that Amazon will allow us to in their infinite wisdom) to ask what went wrong.

And it turns out, we’ve been able to identify some small issues that are worth noting from al this.

Knobs that won’t screw on easily

Sometimes, the lid knobs just don’t seem to want to screw on.  I suspect it is corrosion on the lid screws that is the ultimate culprit here.  When you see a screw that looks like this, you know there will be trouble.

I suspect the tolerance on our embedded nuts is a little tighter in our latest production run vs prior runs.

Here are some things to try if you are having hard time

  • Use some WD-40 or household lubricating oil
  • Scrub a rusty screw with a green Scotch-Brite pad to try and remove as much of the rust as possible.  A wire brush might also be helpful
  • Push the knob onto the screw to try and engage the threads
  • You can always remove the screw, drill a hole, and use a separate screw from the hardware store, as we detail here, if your screw is too far gone.

If it still doesn’t work, contact us for more help

POH-2 pot handle won’t fit flat against the pot or the holes don’t line up

This one is another head scratcher.  We’ve had a few customers where the handle fits on just fine, but the hole in the handle isn’t line up with the hole in the bracket.

If this happens to you, you can sometimes get the screw to fit in just enough to screw down, and it holds fine.  Another solution is to nibble away at the inside hole of the Bakelite handle with a Dremel tool, or a round file, to provide extra room for the screw; usually you just need another 1/16th of an inch.

We’ve also had customers for whom the handle won’t fit all the way over the bracket. Here is the bracket of one such customer (who also had the hole won’t line up issue).

I measured several brackets from my test pots and they came out at 1.75″ x .5″ x 3/16″ (deep) the same exact measurements as the customers bracket.

In this case I sent her a replacement handle that worked, so it was probably just a little extra Bakelite on the inside of the handle where the bracket fits in that was preventing it from going all the way down. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have this problem.  If you are a DIY type person and don’t want to wait for another handle to try, use a Dremel tools to remove some of the Bakelite material from where the bracket fits to get it to seat all the way.

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