by I was looking for a toaster the other day. Not a fancy one — just a toaster. Two slots, a lever, a dial that goes from “barely warm” to “ship it to a museum of charcoal.” The kind of toaster that costs twenty-five dollars and sits on your counter for a decade without asking for anything in return.
You can probably guess where this is going.
There are toasters for a hundred and fifty dollars that connect to your phone. There are toasters for fifteen dollars that feel like they might surrender their plastic shell to gravity at any moment. What I couldn’t find was the twenty-five dollar toaster. The one that’s just a toaster. It seems to have quietly left the building.
This isn’t really about toasters.
It’s about a pattern I keep bumping into across all kinds of things. Restaurants that are either fast food or thirty dollars a plate. Clothing that’s either disposable fast fashion or an investment piece. Tools that are either stamped from the cheapest possible steel or engineered to outlive your grandkids. The middle has gone hollow.
And I wonder what we lost when it did.
There used to be a kind of dignity in the mid-range. It was stuff made by people who understood that most of us weren’t looking for perfection — we were looking for reliability. Something that worked well enough, looked fine enough, and didn’t demand we think about it too hard. Good enough was a perfectly respectable standard. Now it feels like everything is designed to either impress or expire.
Part of this is probably just the marketplace sorting itself out. When manufacturing costs drop and e-commerce flattens every price comparison into a single click, you end up with a race to the bottom on one end and a race to premium on the other. The middle gets squeezed because it can’t compete on price and doesn’t have the cachet for premium. Economics makes sense of it. But economics doesn’t have to live with the result.
The result is that we now have to make a philosophical decision every time we buy a thing. Do I want the cheap version that I’ll replace in a year? Or do I want the expensive version that signals something about my values? There’s no option that just says “I want the thing.”
I don’t think this makes us happier. The cheap stuff frustrates, the premium stuff demands to be appreciated. Neither sits quietly in the background doing its job. You’re always aware of the choice you made.
Maybe what I’m really looking for is a kind of humility in objects. The willingness to be useful without being noticed. The mid-range toaster doesn’t need to be part of your identity. It just wants to brown your bread. And right now, it’s hard to find anything that’s content to be that simple.
— Teganna