We don’t see these often on eBay, original handles from the first few years of Revere Ware production.
Revere Ware find of the week – NOS 8 cup percolator
Get it while it lasts, a new-old-stock (NOS) 8 cup percolator.
Revere Ware unicorn – 3 quart cap + trigger
Every once in a while our saved eBay searches hit on something rare, like this 3 quart tea kettle cap + trigger. And in this case, 7 of them are available!
While customers have reported that our cap made for the 2 1/3 quart kettles will work on the 3 quart model, our trigger clearly doesn’t. And while you can get a trigger 3D printed now in a suitable material, an original is much preferable.
Amazon.com and suspended listings
We sell about 2/3 of our parts via Amazon.com these days. It seems to be the place that people go to look for things, and the low shipping cost is advantageous to customers. But Amazon.com is not without its problems.
Competition: Amazon.com actually advertises with Google to steal business from our website to our products on their website.
Feedback: The feedback system on Amazon.com is just broken. Happy customers rarely leave positive feedback but people with a bad experience often do, leading to a skewed feedback rating.
No-questions asked return policy: People often use negative feedback to justify returns, in response to their own failure to check product details. We see a lot of “it didn’t fit” which to us clearly means they didn’t bother to check the copious details we have for our products to avoid wrong purchases.
It is that last one that really gets us. We get enough returns by people that just don’t bother to check the details that about once a month, one of our products on Amazon.com gets suspended due to and “abnormally high” return rate. We then have to go through a rigamarole to get the listing activated again.
One time, we decided just to leave a couple of listings inactive for a while because they constantly had this problem. Eventually, someone tried to hijack the relatively good ratings on the product by submitting changes to the listing name and description, and listing some totally unrelated product in its place.
And then there are the nightmare stories we’ve read about
- Amazon.com suspends a seller account for some unknown reason they won’t disclose. Game over.
- Competitors will leave feedback that claims a product exploded on them, causing Amazon.com to suspend the listing indefinitely with no recourse.
- People actually hijack entire seller accounts and then start listing far inferior products under the same listings.
So, even thought it might make sense to simply close sales on our own website, as our cost per shipped item is much higher than on Amazon.com, we keep it going as a stop-gap against issues with Amazon.com.
You can help support the continuity of independent sellers like us by purchasing from our website, even thought it might cost a bit more due to higher shipping costs.
Revere Ware stories – Margaret
We received this note from Margaret in Canada a few weeks ago:
I am a Canadian. Shortly before my marriage in 1958, I drove to the US in order to buy sheets and Revere Ware. Sheets were better quality than Canadian, and Revere Ware was not available in Canada.
My Revere Ware pots are still in excellent condition, copper bottoms and all, and I just wanted it put on record how well they have lasted.
Thanks for the note Margaret. I’m not old enough to have bought them, or received them, new. But I do remember my mother having a set (long gone) and my mother-in-law received a set, which we now have, as a wedding present. And I own a pretty nice set now, all with new handles and hardware. :).
It is a nice reminder of how important Revere Ware has been in many people’s lives, and why it is important to carry on the tradition today.
Revere Ware and the Manhattan Project
It seems that out site is not only the authority on all things Revere Ware cookware, but we are also now quotable on the history of the Revere Ware company, as evidenced by this article that discusses the Revere Copper & Brass company’s involvement in the Manhattan projects. Specifically, our Revere Ware history page is quoted.
The story goes that during WWII, Revere Copper & Brass was subcontracted to help build the first atomic bomb:
In the early 1940s, civilian production was halted by World War II, as items such as smoke bombs and cartridges and rocket cases were needed for the war. The Revere Copper plant in Detroit became an avionics, weapons and electronics facility in 1943. And it became a beryllium facility from 1946 to 1950.
The plant made uranium rods under contracts with the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as beryllium ingots, alloys and billets. In the early 1960s, Revere Copper created a thorium bar, which was divided and sent to other AEC plants.
It seems that part of that facility that remains contaminated, collapsed into the Detroit river recently.
Revere Ware deals of the week – square skillet & bale handle pot
A couple of great items at great buy-it-now and starting bid prices came up today, a square skillet and a bale handle pot.
Happy Birthday to Us; a trip down memory lane
A year ago we celebrated our 10 year anniversary of selling new replacement parts for Revere Ware cookware. If you aren’t familiar, the owners of the Revere Ware brand stopped supplying replacement parts for Revere Ware cookware sometime back in the late 1980’s. For about 20 years, nothing was available.
We started out supplying a handful of parts in 2009 with this basic website, with sales solely on eBay.
- M, L, XL pan handles for vintage skillets and sauce pans
- Lid knobs
- Gaskets for the vintage pressure cookers
- Pot handles for vintage pots and Dutch ovens
Later that year we introduced handles for the post-1968 single screw pots and Dutch ovens, and switched to this beauty of a site; at that point we started selling through our own site, in addition to eBay.
We also started listing our parts on Amazon.com that year. Over the last 10 years, Amazon.com has become a bigger and bigger part of our business.
The blue is eBay, red is our own website, and green is Amazon.com.
In late 2010 we introduced post-1968 newer style single screw handles for skillets and sauce pans, as well as the smallest handle for the pre-1968 2-screw line, followed by gaskets for the 1574 and 1576 line of pressure cookers.
In 2012, we switched from shipping things ourselves to hiring a fulfillment center to do the shipping for us. This helped improve shipping responsiveness, and relieved us of the responsibility of shipping things ourselves, which became increasingly hard with the growing volume of sales and the arrival of our second child (now three) in 2011. We stopped selling on eBay that year, as it was very difficult to integrate eBay sales into our fulfillment center.
In late 2015 we introduced the replacement, cap & trigger, and handle for the 2 1/3 quart tea kettle. We also switched the the current version of our website.
In 2016 we completed a design for a 3D printable trigger for the 3 quart kettle, but materials that could withstand the heat weren’t available until 2018, when we added the model to Shapeways for ordering.
And all the while we’ve continued to add to our collection of manuals, repair guides, ads and catalogs recipes, and blog posts on Revere Ware related subjects.
We also started our ReverWare.org eBay listing classification site in 2010, with major updates in 2014 and 2019. If you aren’t familiar, it makes finding the right replacement Revere Ware piece on eBay a snap.
For the last 11 years, it has been our pleasure to do something nice for the community of Revere Ware owners, fans, and enthusiasts. Enjoy!
Small business sales tax update
Until a Wall Street Journal article today, we haven’t seen any interesting news on the plight of small businesses amid the state push for collection of sales taxes.
Consider how some business far larger than ours are struggling to adapt:
Nicole Snow, chief executive of Darn Good Yarn Inc. in Clifton Park, N.Y., hired a part-time chief financial officer and purchased new sales-tax software in response to the court ruling. Darn Good Yarn plans to spend about $25,000 this year to collect and remit about $90,000 in taxes on $5.4 million in sales to buyers in 34 states.
“It’s quite a big lift for us,” said Ms. Snow, whose company has 21 employees. “There is a lot of complexity for a small company.”
and
JM Bullion Inc., an online seller of precious-metal bars and coins, created a custom sales-tax collection system after determining the big tax-software vendors didn’t understand the intricacies of its industry. That turned out to be a three-month job for the company’s 10-person software-development team.
“It was a huge resource drain on our organization,” said Michael Wittmeyer, CEO of the 50-person company, which has about $600 million in revenue.
The complexity of the cutoff system causes problems too:
Still, business owners have struggled to determine whether they exceed the state cutoffs and how to comply. Joe Wood, owner of TechWholesale.com, which sells two-way radios in all 50 states, said it took more than a week to determine that his one-person company didn’t trip any state sales-tax requirements, though it came close in a handful of states.
“It’s the biggest single moment of anxiety I’ve had businesswise in the last 10 years,” said Mr. Wood, who runs his business from the bedroom of his Covington, Ky., home. “We would have had to bring on an accountant, and I can’t fit one in my bedroom.”
And here is the thing that really gives makes me nervous, states going after small sellers whether or not they are sure the businesses should be collecting taxes:
The growth of internet sales has created an additional tax challenge. The $6.5 million retailer is being audited by Washington state, which says it has a physical presence in the state because products the tape company shipped to an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey were then transshipped by Amazon to a fulfillment center in Washington state.
From our perspective, while the landscape has improved with some of the recent progress (read about them here, here, here, and here), it is still not safe for small businesses like ours.
Thrift stores are alive and well part 2
Last week we visited Big Bear, CA, and found a thrift store there that had lots of Revere Ware lids. This week, it was Santa Maria, CA and a thrift store that had a nice 12 inch vintage skillet with lid for a whopping $4.99.
Thrift store finds are great, because they are generally cheaper than eBay, there is no shipping cost, they typically help a good cause, and the include the fun of the hunt.