The Cost of Convenience

What did you have for breakfast today? Eggs, cereal, toast? Ever wonder where that toast came from? Bread, obviously, but what about the toaster? Where did it come from, and how much did you pay for it? You, a reader of Metropolis, might have paid more for one of polished chrome, with four slots that let you choose which slice is getting toasted, or with the retro look of a Dualit. Mine was about $60, with two slots, chrome, an adjustable toasting mechanism, a defrost option, and a cancel button. The 29-year-old design student Thomas Thwaites bought his for about four pounds from Argos, a cheap British catalog store. Clad in white plastic, the toaster has all the same features as mine (minus a crumb tray). Thwaites then proceeded to take his apart and remake it. From scratch.

It was all to make a point. We’re living in the era of the liberal who eats only what he grows; or eats nothing grown farther than 100 miles from his home; or gives up toilet paper, electricity, and all other modern conveniences. Last year, Thwaites did something similar for his M.A. degree show at the Royal College of Art, in London. He set out to make his own toaster, curious about where things come from, about “the grand scale processes that are hidden in mundane everyday objects as well as the economies of modern scale in modern industry,” as he writes in the accompanying self-published book. He also happens to like toast and be a fan of Douglas Adams. One line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stuck in Thwaites’s mind: “Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

What Thwaites offers up is almost a philosophy of toast: we don’t need toast; it’s just a nice thing. (Though one could argue it’s a necessity for the British. They celebrate marmalade, and like their eggs, mushrooms, melted cheese—even beans—“on toast.”) Toast via toasters is one of those things that have become entitlements in the developed world. (Toast is a pain to make in an oven under the broiler, and over an open fire it isn’t really practical. I tried to live without a toaster for a couple years, until my British husband prevailed.) As Thwaites writes, “In terms of toasters if everyone else has [one] and I don’t, well I’ll feel a bit hard done by, and go buy a toaster if I can afford it. The fact that wealth is relative is I think, one thing that drives the economy. It’s not that people have ‘infinite wants’ just that no one wants to be at the poor end of the scale.”

The toaster sums up our age, our way of consuming not simply bread but products—often cheap, generally thrown out, and barely noticed. One could even call the last 100 years the Toast Century. The first electric toaster was created in 1909 by the Edison General Electric Company, the same year that AEG introduced the electric kettle. Both companies were power suppliers, and their products were designed to drive demand. Together they ushered in an age of products made to anticipate and develop needs, of planned obsolescence. Of toasters. “Like no other object [the toaster] seems to me to encapsulate something of the essence of the modern age,” Thwaites writes. “Close up a desire (for toast) and the fulfilment of that desire is totally reasonable. Perhaps the majority of human activity can be reduced to the pursuit of additional modicums of comfort like an evenly crispy piece of toast. The toaster is a symbol for the stuff that is perhaps unnecessary but then again is quite nice to have, [stuff] we wouldn’t really miss but is so relatively cheap that we might as well have one and throw it away when it breaks or gets dirty or looks old.”

A recent graduate of the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art, Thwaites has a background in microeconomics and artificial intelligence. His undergraduate dissertation was called “Greening the Yuppie: Micro-economic Rational Choice Theory and Environmental Consumerism.” Hardly your typical design student, then. His M.A. project quotes Marx and Adam Smith but is also sympathetic to the Toast Century. He doesn’t advocate that we all make our own toasters—or give up toast—but in the process of making his, he managed to create the world’s most expensive toaster, costing about $1,900, not counting his own labor.

Exactly what building your own product means is problematic when it comes to something as technologically sophisticated as a cheap toaster. Thwaites made rules for himself: he had to make a toaster like one you can buy—electric, two slices, pop-up, and with variable browning. For him, starting from scratch didn’t mean setting out in the woods with only some rocks and sticks but, rather, using tools that didn’t require specialized knowledge—basically, those available before the industrial revolution. “I’m making an object that is usually produced in huge numbers in huge factories,” he wrote, “a domestic object made on a domestic scale.” His process takes us not only on a quest to understand where things come from and what those things represent but also through the history of metallurgy and on a picturesque tour of the U.K.

He started by taking apart his Argos toaster. It had 404 parts, including the 42 individual copper wires entwined to make the power cord, and 17 or so different metals and alloys. He was practical (in a sense) and reduced his materials to five: steel, plastic, copper, nickel, and mica. The search for some of these had him visiting abandoned mines that had been shuttered or turned into visitors’ centers because they were no longer economically feasible. At one, he got iron ore from a display case; unable to find another mine, he got lost in the remote hills of Scotland while looking for outcroppings of mica. He collected copper from puddles in Wales and extracted it via electrolysis.