Heh. My gf had the Amish build a goose house for our farm pond. We know it was Amish built, because we spoke with (in person) the owner of the wood-shop located in an Amish community. When we picked it up, I came with my utility trailer and six big men lifted it off the ground and placed it on my trailer. I was afraid the tires were going to pop.
Once home, we organized a team of friends/neighbors to move it 5 feet at a time to the location where it sits today. Damn, it’s solid!
One our major local grocers advertises many buy-one-get-one specials every week. They even have a distinct “BOGO” logo peppered throughout the store – it’s a major market of their marketing.
However – they have always allowed you to buy a single BOGO at half-price. No special dispensation, no “asking the manager”, nothing like that. You take one BOGO item to the register, you get it half off. You swipe one BOGO item though the self-checkout, you get it half-price.
Conversely (no pun intended), there is a chain show store around here that also features BOGO prominently in their marketing. At that store, you really do have to buy two pairs of shoes to get the discount.
See also my rants (many) about how a store puts things on sale for BOGO, but the price is 20-30% higher than it was a week prior to the BOGO sale.
Yeah, I was going to say, I see “homemade” typically at family run establishments, and “house-made” at larger scale or more expensive restaurants.
Just because a thing is made by Amish folk does not mean no tools or machinery were used. It apparently varies by order but some Amish may eschew electricity but have no objection to using things powered by generators.
The garage in my backyard was built by the Amish. We visited their shop when we were looking for a supplier, and there were power tools galore, all powered by electricity from the power company. When they erected it onsite, they used air-powered nail guns driven by the air compressor which was plugged into their generator.
OK - so what does Amish-made signify?
Heh! Fooled another rube. That guy’s a front (a beard, if you would!) for a huge conglomerate.
Yeah, if the soup is made there on the premises , not from a can, I am okay with “home made”, but “made fresh here” might be better.
Puffery isnt lying.
This is the best burger in town! Puffery and not lying since that is opinion.
We used only fresh beef -if the beef is frozen then that is a lie.
And I also have never heard the term “hand scraped floor”.
And why on earth would anyone want that?
One of my SCA friends actually grew the flax, prepared it, spun it and wove it. My wife has done that with raw wool.
I have a better one – or at least one that I find more annoying. It’s the various excuses that are frequently offered when websites request your consent to use cookies. Among the most annoying offenders is Microsoft, which came up with an excuse that is not just a blatant lie but staggeringly arrogant: “Microsoft cares about your privacy”.
The honest version would read “Microsoft doesn’t give a shit about your privacy, or about you, for that matter. Or your dog. We don’t know any of you from a hole in the ground and prefer to keep it that way. You could shuffle off this mortal coil tomorrow and we wouldn’t know the difference. We are asking and logging your consent to cookies because the communist bastards in the European Union made us do it, against our strenuous objections. In fact we care so little about you that we’ll happily lie right to your face and not care.”
When my son was very little we wanted to get him a toy box for his room. My wife somehow found out about a guy out in the country who was a woodworker and made such things, so we drove out to have a look.
The first surprise when we got there made us double-check the address. The place was a palatial mansion. It was clearly some wealthy guy who did woodworking as a hobby. Anyway the point of the story, perhaps relevant to Amish craftsmanship although the guy wasn’t Amish, is the value of skilled craftsmanship regardless of who the craftsman is. The toy box we got is absolutely beautiful and I have it still. The surfaces are beautifully but tastefully carved, the fit is perfect and solid, and the top even has a hand-painted picture at the center (of fruits and flowers). There’s that “hand” adjective again, but clearly what I mean is that it’s not a decal, it was clearly painted with a brush. The toy box looked like something right out of the movie Toy Story.
I have no idea what we paid for it but I don’t think it was very much. The guy clearly had all the money he needed and was more interested in puttering around his woodworking shop and creating things. True craftsmanship is definitely worth paying for, not just in monetary cost but in terms of the effort of searching for it and grabbing it when you find it.
The ones that get to me are the useless adjectives that really add no useful information to the description. Like a “chef-prepared” item. I mean, if I’m at a restaurant who else would have prepared it but a chef? I suppose that one could be trying to convey the same idea as “house made”, that the chef made it themselves rather than just opening a can or something. But then there’s “oven-baked” ham. What else would they bake it in?
About a month ago, I ate in a restaurant in Arlington, Mass. The meal was fine, but at the bottom of the menu in one point type (okay, I exaggerate) was a notice that they added a 4% “adminstrative fee” to the bill. WTF is that all about. They could print menus with that notice, but they couldn’t print menus with the actual prices?
In my earlier days, I built some furniture that we still use. I used a power drill, a router, and a saber saw. I still consider them hand-built. One place I didn’t was for mitred corners. I had a quality mitre box and a back saw. I assume that there are power tools for that, but none of mine gave corners anywhere near as accurate as these hand tools.
I haven’t built furniture but in a previous house I did install baseboards in the whole downstairs living area. The house had gorgeous refinished hardwood floors but just cheap painted baseboards. I replaced them with elegantly tall oak baseboards stained to match the floor. I used a tall mitre box for the outside corners that I managed to find somewhere – the baseboards were much too tall for regular mitre boxes. For the inside corners, I used the traditional coping saw method.
It all turned out quite well, which is good because with natural stained oak you can’t fix mistakes with filler and paint. But the whole time I wished I had a radial arm saw. I find it hard to believe that a good quality radial arm saw, properly adjusted, wouldn’t do at least a good a job as a mitre box and hand saw, and certainly do it much faster and more easily.
Similar anecdote. My Father-in-law retired from military, retired from military contract work, retired from a minor consulting work for military contractors, and took up honest-to-god blacksmithing.
He has several coal/coke fired forges, but also does a lot with a propane powered unit since doing it yourself without someone to crank the blower leads to a lot of waste time and poorer temperature control.
Still, while not as wealthy as the gentleman @wolfpup mentions, he’s fully comfortable, and often creates and sells work “at cost” plus a nominal charge for his time. He has zero interest in spending the time and effort to be a commercial success. It’s mostly to keep busy and have fun.
lemme one-up you with “your call IS important to us” …
no, it fugging isnt…
if it were important to you you’d not have me holding the line for the better part of the day and then hand it over to some poor-sob-script-monkey en a far off land with literally zero degree of freedom to solve any problems, handing out the acoustic equivalent of an Aspirin
For those who’ve never encountered the term “hand-scraped floor”. It’s a high end antiquing process.
and
isn’t that a lawsuit waiting to get triggered? (and I completely understand you did not go that route ;-))
if there is NO way around this 4% - than it MUST be added to the price … (IANAL) …
I don’t understand why the media/BBB isn’t picking those stories up more often … (they seem to be quite frequent from what I also see on reddit) … I am really getting too old for that kind of BS.
Now that the USA restaurant industry is finally getting onboard with the rest of the world in giving the servers remote payment devices, we’ve all seen the prompt screen that offers three percentage choices of tip level, plus [custom] and [no tip]. The layout details vary, but that screen is pretty well universal on these devices.
When these devices first started appearing ~10 years ago I’d seen a few offering 10%, 12%, 15% and many offering 12%, 15%, 18%. That held steady until fairly recently, say post-COVID, when the most common options became 15%, 18%, and 20% with some restaurants still back at 12%, 15%, 18%.
The other day, admittedly at a pretty nice place, the tip prompts were 22%, 25%, and 28%. Which set a new record for me at least.
At least the menu (and the charge slip) didn’t include a “service” charge on top of that.
That’s another thing: Do the waitstaff at a $50 a meal place really work five times as hard as the folks at the $10 place? Why is tipping even a percentage of the price at all? If anything, we should be tipping a lower percentage at the nice places.
But on the question of “hand-made” and craftsmanship, I’ve been giving that some thought over the past few days, because of a project I’m working on right now. It’s almost all makerspace stuff, 3D printing and laser cutting. Which means that, once I’m done, if it works, I can (and plan to) just freely distribute my files, so anyone at all can make their own. And when they do it, it won’t take them skilled craftsmanship-- If I do it right, they’ll just have to push a few buttons and then do some IKEA-level assembly work. So in that sense, it won’t be a “hand-crafted” product they get… but meanwhile, in order to make all of that work so seamlessly, I am having to put in a lot of hard, complicated work with the design. So, does that mean that the prototype I make for myself will be “hand-crafted”, but all the ones after that aren’t? Are they all hand-crafted, just very efficiently? Or maybe we need some other word entirely? I dunno.
Whereas you’ll be up the creek in no time if you advertise your restaurant as “kosher” when it’s only “kosher-style.”