I think I've told the story here of shopping for a carafe for the coffee machine and finding the world's strangest review, right?
If I haven't, older son and I are cheap coffee fiends. No, this doesn't mean we buy cheap coffee, just that we sometimes (coff or always) buy our coffee machines at thrift stores, provided the machines are very good quality. We, of course, clean them well before first use. Anyway, I no longer remember the brand, but in son's last years in our house, we bought a very good machine at a thrift store. And, once cleaned, it served us well.
Until the day I was too sleepy to make coffee, and therefore dropped the carafe which shattered. This of course created an emergency and I had two choices: Buy another coffee maker (but there was nothing decent in the thrift stores near us) or buy a new carafe. Failing to find a replacement carafe in the local store, I hit Amazon. The carafe was $25, aka about five times what I paid for the whole thing to begin with, but since we loved the machine (and it was originally very expensive) I decided to order it.
Before I did, though, I hit the comments. There weren't many one stars, but I find those are important to read. So I did.
Er.... So, the most vociferous one said that the quality had gone way down. This person had used their previous carafe for years to dig in their flower beds, but this one had lost the handle after a few uses. No, it wasn't a joke review. I checked his other reviews and they seemed.... sane. Weirdly.
So, why am I telling this story?
Today we were looking for lids for our bathroom trash cans. (Indy, okay? He digs everything out, spreads it around the bathroom and bedroom floor, and thinks that q-tips are the bestest toys.) In the reviews we found they were being used for all sorts of other things, including as rodent defense in the garden.
None of the uses were as completely nuts as using a carafe for gardening, and they all made sense in context, particularly for the price, but Dan and I started talking about how people will pick something and do a completely unexpected thing from it, and sometimes it works and eventually a specialized version is made for it.
I can't for sure prove that Americans do this more than other people. In fact I know that in totalitarian countries (in the former USSR for sure) people have to use very strange things to survive, because the things they actually need aren't available. And we grew up improvising very odd things out of other very odd things.
However, in America it's done not out of necessity, but usually out of abundance and sheer inventiveness. Like, you know, seeing these woven metal trash can lids and going "Hey, they're very cheap. These would be perfect to protect my gourds from squirrels."
I wonder if this is why we tend to innovate more: both the benefits of the free market and of a natural culture of "doing for oneself" which has most of us growing vegetables, raising chickens, and "yes." And often not finding exactly what we want at the price we want it for our strange arrangements.
I can't prove Americans do it more. But to the extent we have free market, (Yes, I do know how curtailed it is. Except compared to almost everyone else) it has unleashed both prosperity and leisure which allows us to innovate more.
And it's a wonderful thing, even above and beyond the fact it amuses me greatly.
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