Should you spend money on your kitchen and tableware?
"Generally, the more you pay, the more refined and resilient."
Home Life
Top row on the left, Wedgewood at $129.00 for 4 pieces, on the right Maxwell Williams at $69.00 for 16 pieces. Bottom row on the left K-mart $29.00 for 24 pieces, on the right K-Mart $7.00 for 12 pieces.
"Living like a king? That's when you not only own but actually use the fancy $100-per-place-setting china you got from grandmother or were gifted at your wedding. " Apartment Therapy
Doubtless there is even more expensive dinnerware than the Wedgewood, but it gives an example of the differences. The Wedgewood maybe has slightly more design flair, but not much. We own the Maxwell Williams set for our daily use and it looks pretty good. It's supposed to be porcelain, and you can sort of see through it which I think is one of the indicators, but nevertheless I'm sure it's not as beautifully and carefully made as the Wedgewood, but it does the job. We don't worry too much about it breaking - you can replace individual pieces if you like or just wait until you have broken so many you buy a new set, which is cheaper. And as for the K-Mart $7.00 offering - yes that's what it said $7.00 for 12 pieces, now I find that really hard to believe. No cup or mug it is true, but perfectly serviceable plates and bowls.
And yes, I am sure that the cheap stuff is made in some sweat shop in China, and my aforesaid remark about not worrying about breaking it, is also a bit unenvironmental. Think of the waste problem. Did you know though, that there is a veritable small hill of pottery shards in Rome? So we've been doing that for a long time. Not that it makes it right of course, because I don't think you can melt it down and make new pottery, like glass. You could maybe do something artistic with it, or maybe if it is ground down you can do something, but currently I think not.
We also have an expensive dinner set from the Arabia company, purchased when we were setting up home in Melbourne, but I have to say it rarely gets used these days. For special dinner parties only. We tend not to use it for big family dinners for fear of breakages, and the inability to replace the pieces. I looked them up. The original Finnish factory closed in 2016. Arabia ware is now made in Romania and Thailand and Wedgewood too is now made in Indonesia - just the hand-painted stuff is made in England. So maybe the cheap stuff at K-mart, which is made in one of those cheap Asian places is not so bad after all. Maybe it's made in the same factories.
This post was inspired by one of K-mart's junk mail catalogues. So please excuse me if this sounds like one giant ad for K-mart. It isn't. What I am about to say can apply to any number of other cheap outlets for these things - IKEA, Aldi, Target, BigW ... This particular catalogue featured some of their more 'expensive' tableware:
If you click on the pictures you can see them better. They have obviously gone to some effort to design something that looks good and/or is fashionable. I could be tempted if I didn't already have too much of this stuff. The pink plates at left are interesting. Obviously the design world thinks we should all be going for pink plates. I saw some very similar ones from one of the expensive companies - can't remember which - and Aldi had some a week or so ago. Interestingly, there were also other colours for the Aldi ones - white and black I think. They all went. The pink ones linger. So no matter what the designers think, the people just want the white and black. As I say, these items are K-Mart's 'upmarket' stuff. Some of those plates cost $3.00 each - which is much more expensive than their $7.00 set of white plates and bowls. It's still not expensive though.
Seeing that the 'name' companies, or at least some of them, are now outsourcing their production facilities to Asia, then I wonder if this is a case of the expensive and the cheap all coming out of the same factories.
Glasses are another case in point, though I haven't researched them here. All of the 'cheap' sources have very cheap, and moderately cheap glasses. Which is what we buy these days. When we first married we bought some Orrefors glasses and we did use them. I don't think we have any white wine glasses left, and perhaps 1 red wine. A few spirit glasses and liqueur glasses, because they got used less frequently. They break and really you should probably wash them by hand, which is a pain.
Then there are the pots and pans.
As a wedding present my aunt gave us a set of Crown Corning saucepans (Corningware today), I think. Anyway they looked nice and were very good quality and were fantastically easy to clean. They are relatively expensive. We still have them, but have demoted them to the Gatehouse. When we built the Gatehouse I thought I would treat myself to a new expensive set of saucepans and so, in a sale admittedly, I bought a set of Gordon Ramsay Royal Doulton saucepans and frying pan. Not a great choice as it turns out. Not very easy to clean. We have often had to resort to steel to clean them, and they burn easily. The frying pan especially is not good and so one day when Aldi was having a special on frying pans I bought one and it's fantastic. I have also bought a few other Aldi coockpots - including a rather lovely tagine - and they are all wonderful. They are not all non-stick - just the frying pans - and I will come to that in a minute. Mostly they are either stainless steel or cast iron. I now have an induction cooktop and so cannot use some of the stuff they produce. The picture above is from the K-Mart catalogue. Don't they all look good? Completely stylish.
Non-stick. If you look up non-stick on the net you will see a whole lot of stuff that tells you you will die if you use it. And yes there are distinct dangers with old non-stick stuff or non-stick stuff whose coating is beginning to flake off. Discard, because there is a chemical that is dangerous, either through absorption or inhaling. However, that chemical is no longer used in Teflon - the non-stick component, certainly in America and probably here. Mind you, you should never overheat non-stick pans, you should only use wood, plastic or silicon utensils and you should not heat it up with nothing in it. If the coating is flaking off then throw it out. So if you are at all worried about this use cast iron or stainless steel. I see that Le Creuset has opened up in Doncaster so go take a look at their offerings. Which will set you back a lot of money. I suspect the Aldi knockoffs are just as good.
Anyway it seems that moral concerns about sweatshops by buying cheap are fading due to the big companies manufacturing in the same countries. And there's always the worry that if you don't buy then there's no work at all for the poor of Asia. But perhaps be a little bit careful about non-stick. As for the plates and things - buy what you like and what you can afford I say.
And a final word about Christofle cutlery. It's a funny little saying that we learnt when talking to some friends about Christofle - a very, very expensive French cutlery. The saying applies to the above categories too.
"There are three kinds of people; Those who own Christofle, those who aspire to own Christofle and those who have never heard of Christofle."
We were in the last category.
