There's a Reason Your Cookware Doesn't Last
"Enshittification"has entered the kitchen.
One of the first things I did after the haze of new love began to dissipate with husband was throw away his toaster.
It had been his mom’s––maybe his grandmother’s? And it was hideous. Scratched, plastic orange handle, retro (but not in a good way). Though small, it took up a disproportionate amount of counter space in our tiny Brooklyn kitchen.
I was determined, but a wee bit anxious. Not that I might cause a rupture in our relationship, but that my new, nicer toaster would not work as well as his. Old and hideous it was, but it did exactly what it was meant to do: toast bread quickly and well. When I went to a store to scope out a new model, I told the salesperson to choose wisely, my new marriage depended on it. (Since then, 17 years ago, we’ve had two toasters and are still married.)
We all know older appliances work better. The question is: why? Maybe it’s because they’re made in China. Maybe it’s our consumer culture that encourages us to get new stuff all the time. Maybe it’s the depressingly real concept of “enshittification.” (If you’re not familiar, keep reading!) Most of us just accept it and move on.
Not Kenyana Sapp, the independent journalist behind the brilliant site Worse On Purpose, which he describes as “corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what’s still worth buying.”
Sapp’s toaster moment came when he went shopping for a new backpack––a JanSport, just like the one he used in school. Immediately, though, he could tell that it was of lesser quality. He did some digging and discovered that four or five of the brands he had been comparing were owned by the same conglomerate. He also turned up an enormous number of first-person accounts from people saying those same brands had declined after the ownership changed.
Sapp wrote up what he found and posted it on r/BIFL (Reddit/Buy It For Life). The post went viral, as did a follow up investigation on eyeglasses. “Those two posts made it obvious that these are stories people just aren’t aware of,” Sapp told me. “There is plenty of reporting on mergers and licensing deals from a Wall Street angle. There is almost none on what those deals do to the products you buy.” Worse on Purpose fills that gap.
Last month, Sapp did one of his classic deep dives into cookware. It’s another doozy—and indictment of greedy private equity firms. Sapp gave me the overview about who owns what and which brands still offer quality. A link to his full list is at the end of this post!
Jane Black: For the uninitiated, can you explain what “enshittification” is and if/how is it related to the way companies make “worse” things?
Kenyana Sapp: Cory Doctorow coined the term in 2022 for digital platforms. The simplest definition is the slow degradation of a product or service by whoever controls it. My work covers the same mechanism as it relates to physical consumer goods.
It comes down to incentives, and specifically to time horizon. Most companies are built by someone who intends to run the business for a long time. When that’s your plan, your reputation and the trust of your customer are the most valuable things you own.
When ownership transfers, either into a conglomerate or a private equity firm, that connection gets severed. What replaces it answers to a return on a far shorter horizon. Reputation is still an asset on the books, but it becomes an asset to spend rather than one to protect.
So corners get cut. Thinner steel, a cheaper hinge, an offshored handle, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers. Every one of those is a margin improvement this quarter and a small withdrawal from a reputation someone else spent decades building.
JB: Why did you decide to focus on cookware?
KS: I get most of my insight into what to cover next from my readers. Cookware was one of the most requested categories in my inbox, so it went into the queue.
It turned out to be an unusually good fit. The replacement cycle for a pan is five years or more. When you buy something you expect to keep that long, the brand’s reputation does almost all of the work, because there’s very little other information available to you in the store.
Compare it to a t-shirt. You buy those constantly and you know within three washes whether it was any good. That feedback loop is fast enough to punish a company. With cookware, the difference between a pan that lasts five years and one that lasts ten is nearly impossible to detect at the moment of purchase, and by the time you can detect it, a decade has gone by and the company has changed hands twice.
That lag is what makes a category worth harvesting. The extraction runs longest and richest in durable goods that are hard to judge, which is why so much of what I write about is mattresses, appliances, eyewear, tools, and now cookware.
JB: Give us an overview of what you discovered?
KS: Eighty-one brands in the cookware and tabletop aisle trace back to six companies.
Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, holds Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Instant Pot and Chicago Cutlery, Anchor Hocking, Lenox and Oneida. That’s most of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.
Groupe SEB, the French conglomerate behind T-fal, owns All-Clad, WMF, Lagostina and, as of last year, de Buyer, the French carbon steel maker. We’ll need to see whether they are able to maintain quality.
Meyer manufactures over 100,000 pans a day, almost none of which bear the Meyer name. It makes Farberware cookware, KitchenAid cookware, Circulon, Anolon and Rachael Ray. The KitchenAid pots at Target carry the mixer company’s name and Meyer’s Thai steel.
Newell owns Calphalon. American Securities owns Cuisinart. Lifetime Brands owns or rents nearly everything else, including Mikasa, Pfaltzgraff and the American license for Sabatier. It manufactures almost nothing itself.
The important distinction here is between a brand and a company. A brand is a name and a promise. A company is a factory, a payroll and a set of engineers. In the cookware aisle those two things have come apart almost completely. Shoppers buy the first one and assume the second still exists behind it.
JB: Can you walk us through the example of Pyrex?
KS: Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915. It is borosilicate glass that resists thermal shock unlike anything else that existed before.
The glass changed first. American Pyrex today is tempered soda-lime, a different material with roughly 55°C of thermal headroom against 183°C for borosilicate. That switch actually happened under Corning itself, decades before any buyout.
Corning ultimately sold the consumer business in 1998 to a KKR-affiliated buyer for about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, so it was born owing more than it had. It went bankrupt by 2002. Cornell Capital bought it in 2017, merged it with the Instant Pot, borrowed $450 million in April 2021 and paid a $345 million dividend nine days later, roughly $200 million of it to Cornell and its co-investors. Chapter 11 followed in 2023. Lenders who were collectively owed $391 million recovered only seven to nine cents on the dollar.
Centre Lane bought the wreckage and folded it into Anchor Hocking. In April 2025 it closed the Charleroi, Pennsylvania plant, which had been making glass since 1893 and Pyrex for most of the last century. Three hundred people worked there. When the last piece of glass came off the line, the plant whistle blew for 132 seconds, one for each year it had been operational.
JB: How does cookware compare to other industries you’ve looked into?
KS: I would say eyewear and mattresses, for example, are actually more consolidated. One of the great things about cookware is the number of independent manufacturers still making great products in most categories. Cookware is relatively simple to manufacture (compared to mattresses or appliances, for example), so it is possible for smaller operations to compete.
That being said, cookware was the hardest industry to map of any I’ve covered. The reason is licensing. In most categories you can follow ownership and get your answer. In cookware, licensing sits on top of ownership, and the name gets sliced up category by category.
Farberware is a great example. The Bronx plant closed in 1996. Two buyers split the company, and Meyer paid $25.5 million, once, for an exclusive worldwide license to put the Farberware name on cookware for a term of 200 years. The lease runs to 2196. Lifetime Brands holds the cutlery and gadget side separately. So a single name on a shelf can have two landlords, several unrelated factories, and no company anywhere that actually answers for the product.
Sabatier is worse. More than thirty unrelated firms have rights to that name. The version on American shelves is rented by Lifetime and made in China.
JB: Is there someone to blame for allowing big financial companies to get away with this? What kind of oversight do we need?
KS: It comes down to incentives and the fact that very little checks them anymore.
There used to be two ways to hold a company to account. You sued it, or a regulator stopped it. Both have been blunted.
On the private side, companies learned to write arbitration clauses with class action waivers into the terms nobody reads. The Supreme Court upheld them in 2011 and again in 2013, and when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wrote a rule banning them in financial contracts, Congress repealed it in 2017 on a tie-breaking vote.
On the other side, regulators are impotent, or at the very least, too slow to be effective. Pennsylvania sued to keep the Pyrex Charleroi plant open. The judge declined to block the closure, the plant shut in April 2025, and whatever that case eventually decides will land years after the thing it was meant to prevent.
When the penalty for consumer rights violations amounts to a rounding error and arrives years late, degrading the product becomes the rational choice for a profit-maximizing entity to make.
That being said, the consumer still has the power to affect change. Where we spend our money matters. Buy from companies where the person who earned the brand’s reputation is still the owner.
Which companies are those? Worse on Purpose has a full list of
brands you can still trust.
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Informative and entertaining!
Yes!!!!