Consumerism Thursday: Needle Bait and Switch

I'm a rather fanatical knitter, and because of my joint problems, I'm very fussy about the tools I use. I only use nickel-plated circular needles with flexible cables and very sharp points. Wood, plastic, bamboo and stainless steel were to sticky for me, and the other nickel brands were blunt, so out of dozens of brands on the market, the only supplier I found with needles that didn't cause me hand pain was Knitpicks.com. They had a lifetime warranty, so when I got a needle that broke or had a rough spot, I'd call and a new one would promptly be dispatched, no questions asked. Everything was lovely and happy for about two years.

Then this winter I ordered a few needles, and they just weren't the same. The points were blunter; the cables were darker and stiffer. Complaints built up in various knitting fora, saying the new wooden needles were more likely to split, that the cables were stiffer and the needles generally more fragile. Someone noticed that the needle packaging now said "Made in China" instead of "Made in India" and we concluded Knitpicks had changed suppliers without telling anyone. The manufacturer studiously ignored the complaints until about a month ago, when they sent this to their mailing list:

Forgive me, but this is the biggest piece of corporate bullshit double-speak I've ever seen. It's more like: "Thanks to savvy and subtle manufacturing improvements moving our manufacturing from India to China, we're now able to offer the same beautiful product, crappier needles that only visually resemble their Indian-made counterparts at an even more beautiful price a much lower price, while we capitalize on our customers' naive assumption that these needles are the same ones we've always sold. Cha-ching!"

I've long liked Knitpicks because their low prices let people try high-quality, natural fiber yarns which might otherwise be unaffordable. Most of my stash is Knitpicks yarn, and I've been very happy with their products, but I doubt if I'll ever buy from them again. I am not impressed by these kind of underhanded tactics. (Not that I need more yarn in any event.)

There is a happy ending to this story. The Indian factory had gone into business on their own, and now manufactures the same needles with only cosmetic differences, to the old quality standards, with a lifetime guarantee and a vastly expanded product line, under the name Knitter's Pride. Check your local yarn store or Ebay for them. I've been using some and they're just like the old Knitpicks needles.

ETA: In what is obviously a sadistic joke, Knitpicks released a new yarn line today that I'm totally in love with.

Consumerism Thursday: KitchenAid Disappointment

Long-time blog readers all two of you and that includes my mom will be familiar with my ongoing rants about the declining quality of consumer goods. Here's another entry for the files.

My mother was a serious baker, and I grew up using her KitchenAid stand mixer, which is so old it predated her marriage to my father. So when I got married and my grandmother offered me one as a gift, I was thrilled. Nana wasn't messing around either; the mixer is a 6 quart professional series one. It's an absolutely gorgeous appliance. When we moved to NYC a year ago, I finally had a kitchen where I could really use the mixer.

And I discovered that this isn't my mother's mixer. My mother's mixer has mixed over a thousand pounds of bread dough, cookie dough and cake batters since the early 80's, and it's still cranking merrily along. Mine overheats, has an acrid smell if you let it run past ten minutes and struggles to handle a fairly simple, soft bread dough. I don't think I've even made a hundred pounds of dough in it yet, and it's already showing serious signs of wear.

I made bread last night, since CodeMonkey is not enthused by the idea of a low-carbohydrate diet. I realized that my KitchenAid nods its little mixer-head up and down in the most pitiful manner. My mother's never did that. It's like the whole mixer is thrown together half-assedly. I will be surprised if I'm using it 5 years from now, let alone 25. The bread recipe I'm mixing up in the video below has been made in my mother's smaller, older KitchenAid before with nary a wobble or complaint.

What bugs me most about this is that the KitchenAid professional series is the top of the line mixer for the home market. If this one is crappy, there's really nothing better to buy, unless you want to go the route my best friend did and buy a full-on Hobart industrial mixer. (That thing is beast; it's amazing. I totally covet it.)

So I called my mother to grouse about my mixer, and she told me that Hobart used to produce KitchenAids, but they sold the brand to Whirlpool in 1986, and the quality has gone downhill since. Good quality is increasingly hard to find at any price, and I'm getting sick of corporations trading on old reputations of high quality to sell crap.

But! You should really make that bread recipe I linked above. It makes the tastiest, most lovely sandwich bread you could imagine, and you can make the dough by hand. To bake it, you'll need a pullman pan, a sort of long, rectangular shaped loaf pan with a lid, that turns out perfectly square sandwich loaves. I can't say enough good things about that pan I linked above. It's sturdy, made in the USA, and has some kind of space-age silicon finish on the inside that makes loaf after loaf slide out of the pan perfectly. It's one of the only unitaskers I allow in my kitchen, and it's worth every single penny.