My hair dryer died this afternoon. It was one of those portable machines called a “soft bonnet hair dryer,” – a facsimile of the hooded machines you see in salons.
It’s made up of a small plastic box with a vent on top, and a skinny plastic hose that connects to a soft plastic bonnet that fits over the head. Not very glamorous I know. I bought the dryer while I was in college – nearly 20 years ago. Yeah, this thing lasted two decades and never broke once. When I turned it on this afternoon to dry my curls, no air blew out of the hose. Instead, it emitted a rattling sound and then a whine. A faint, acrid odor wafted from the air vent. I knew this was the end.
This story may sound kinda silly, but I really do have an important point to make. You see, my hair dryer was not made in some sweatshop in China. It was made by a long-defunct Kansas-based company called Dazey Corp. I found out through a Google search that Dazey was primarily a manufacturer of small kitchen appliances with a hair care products division. In 1996, the kitchen appliances division was sold to a Missouri company, Rival Co., and the hair care division was sold to global hair care company, Helen of Troy. At its demise, Dazey had been around for nearly 100 years. A small American flag insignia on the box my hair dryer came in says “Since 1899 – Proudly Made In America.”
You rarely see marks like this on stuff you buy anymore, if at all.
This story about my hair dryer points to the larger issues of quality vs. quality and America’s lost manufacturing base. I don’t really know for sure how Dazey treated its workers once upon a time, but I want to believe the company treated them well because that Made In America label meant something. It meant quality. A job well done. The people who made my hair dryer so long ago probably pulled in good wages - enough to support their families, enough to buy a nice house, a nice car, and tuition for their kids’ college education. Perhaps they took vacations in their RVs, or even traveled to London for the first time. I hope they got good pensions, enough to retire in some far off tropical place.
Today when I look at manufactured merchandise, I don’t get those sunny images of American factory workers living the American dream. I wince inside, knowing that when I fork over my money, I’m contributing to the exploitation of overworked and underpaid workers who live in a brutal dictatorship. That I’m helping to further erode what’s left of American manufacturing base, and contributing to the entrenchment of a low-wage, service-based economy. But I keep hoping as I turn over a clothing tag or flip over a new music player, the label will say, “Made In America.” Usually, I’m disappointed. We still make a few things in the US of A, but trying to track down such items is like chasing Sasquatch. And when I get home, I always hope the Chinese-made junk I bought doesn’t fall apart after the first washing or self-destruct days after the year-long warranty is up.
Now that credit is harder to come by, maybe the days of rampant consumption are numbered. For too long, we borrowed to buy things we couldn’t afford and didn’t need. And when we got tired of those things, we bought new things. Because all this stuff is deliberately made cheaply in order to be disposable. So that we’ll have to buy more and more and more, over and over and over. Will the country’s economic collapse bring back a demand for quality over quantity? Will people once again appreciate workmanship and value objects that last? Will Proudly Made In America make a comeback, along with all the jobs that disappeared? In the meantime, I’ll be lucky if the next hair dryer I buy lasts even a couple of years.