Suggestions for additional research
Stefan suggests…
Partly a request, more of a suggestion:
You keep coming up empty handed on a lot of things – no longer made by anybody in the USA.
However, you and your readers should remember that a much wider range of merchandise USED TO BE made in the USA. Much of this stuff is still out there and available used. If one is lucky, one might even find something available that has been sitting around unused.
A few examples:
Corded telephones are no longer made in USA. However, they USED to be, by Western Electric, and they were made much better than the imports are now. When everything used to be under the Bell System, you rented rather than owned your phone, and if something went wrong (which it rarely did), they would just come out and exchange phones; the phone you got might not be new, but no matter. IMHO, people can buy a used Western Electric corded phone with a high degree of confidence that it will last AT LEAST as well as any modern imported phone.
Hand calculators are not made in the USA either, but I know that at least Texas Instruments and HP used to, and they made good stuff back then. If one looks, one can still find those up for sale on places like ebay.
Small Kitchen Appliances made in the USA are getting harder to find now, and are impossible in some categories, but of course just about everything used to be made here by several different manufacturers. In some cases, if one looks hard enough one can find new old stock or new in box merchandise from these US makers. There are even places like toastercentral.com that are in the business of refurbishing some of the best of these old US-made models.
Which leads to my request: If you can’t find anybody who is presently making consumer durable goods in the USA, could you at least try to give us some suggestions as to who USED to make it? This would be very helpful for those of us who are hunting for needles of good old USA stuff in the haystack of junk that is out there.
Thanks!