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Beware the blue postal mailboxes

By on November 14, 2022 in Shipping

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)

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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More about small business regulations

By on October 25, 2022 in Uncategorized

I’ve reported a number of times on the issues in recent years with the aggressive moves by states to grab income tax from out-of-state sellers (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine).  I’m surely not the only small business to get the jitters from all this; I recently came across a blog post on this topic from a small seller of retro electronic that I follow that highlights an additional issues along these lines; not only our states, but countries are creating more aggressive regulations, making it harder for small businesses to compete on an international scale.

In summary / TL;DR:

GDPR is responsible for all the “cookie warnings” that almost every website has now.  Like shady attorneys pursuing website accessibility lawsuits in the US, there are a litany of such attorneys pursuing GDPR lawsuits against companies in the EU.  This has created extra hassles (and costs) for small businesses and extra hassles for end users.

LUCID requires companies to declare their annual weight of shipped packages and then purchase a packaging license from a third party; it appears to be mostly enforced by Germany, but applies to the entire EU.

VAT tax collection by EU and Canada (we haven’t seen that yet) is causing shipment delays and extra hassle for customers.

The bottom line is that the regulatory burden that negatively affects small businesses is getting worse, not better.  I’ve always thought that people in the public sector making these laws are lacking in practical business experience, which leads to laws that hurt rather than help our nations small businesses.

I think our leaders need to remember that small businesses (fewer than 500 employees) employ over 60 million people in the US.  They would be wise to consider how new laws and regulations affect small businesses before implementing them.

 

 

 

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Best of Revere Ware blog – Is Revere Ware oven safe

By on October 16, 2022 in Care

We have answered this question via our customer support perhaps 100 times, and first wrote about it on our blog back in 2013.   It’s been in our care guide probably since 2009.  It is still one of our most common questions we get.

As far as we know, Revere Ware did initially claim that their cookware was oven safe to a temperature of 350 F.  But in later years they revised their recommendation to not use Bakelite parts in the oven at all. The change is probably due to the fact that earlier ovens were gas fired from the bottom and tended to heat evenly where newer ovens (electric) can heat from a broil burner and areas of the oven (near the top) can easily exceed the safe temperature for Bakelite (350 degrees F) even with the oven temperature set to below 350.

Even worse, modern ovens have a rapid preheat cycle that will use very high settings on the electric coils to get an oven up to operating temperature up fast.

The problem is that, if you overheat Bakelite, it won’t just melt.  Bakelite is a phenolic plastic, which is made from, among other things, formaldehyde.  If you overheat Bakelite it will break down and release the formaldehyde. Trust me, it smells bad and you don’t want to experience this.

If you really want a Revere Ware Dutch oven that you can put in the oven, look for some of the all metal pieces, such as from the Institutional / 5000 line, or the 1800 Patio Ware line.  You’ll get that iconic copper bottom and something that is oven safe.  See our photo guide for more information on these and other lines.

Patio Ware / 1400 line

 

Institutional / 5000 line

 

 

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A word about returns

By on October 4, 2022 in Returns, Shipping

Some years ago, before getting married and having a family, a woman I was dating was almost obsessed with returning a can of paint to K-Mart.  The gallon of paint cost $12 and some change.  For whatever reason, it took four trips to finally get the return done.  To her, it clearly wasn’t about the money (she undoubtedly spend more time and (gas) money effecting the return than she got back); it was about the principal.  She had been given the wrong color or something and she was determined she get her money back.

With that in mind, I have a comment about sending returns back to us.  Let me say that we are happy to accept returns, do the degree that we will refund everything but what it cost us to ship the part(s) to you.  Even that doesn’t really cover out cost of sending orders, as our fulfillment costs (labor + postage + packaging) are more than we charge for shipping on every order.  But that’s fine, we’ll take that hit.  And I should say, if the incorrect order is our fault (something more than a customer not fully reading our website product description), we’ll cover the shipping too; it’s the right thing to do.

What surprises me is when people send low cost items back and it costs them more postage than they will get as a refund.  For example, we recently received a return for a hardware set that we sell for $4.49, and the shipping on the outside of the return enveloped was for $4.50.  I have to wonder what was gained by sending the return back.  Perhaps it is a principle thing.

On that note, if for some reason we mess up and send you the wrong part, you may find that we may want you to just keep or dispose of the wrong part, rather than send you a return envelope; if the cost of all that return shipping is more than the cost to produce the part, it just doesn’t make sense from our perspective.

 

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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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“S” stamp on the bottom of Revere Ware

By on September 26, 2022 in Interesting

Reader Henry send in this interesting stamp on the bottom of a vintage Revere Ware piece.

The S on the bottom marks the piece as a second, meaning, there was something wrong with it that it wasn’t up to the standard for sale as a new piece.  But given the fact that a number of people have come across well-used pieces with that stamp, seconds were likely perfectly functional nonetheless.

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Pristine early logo

By on September 21, 2022 in History

Reader Dave sends us this very deep and clear logo from one of the earliest Revere Ware pieces, likely sometime prior to 1945.

Pieces that old usually have the copper worn down so much the logo isn’t visible anymore.

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