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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

Toasters are a waste of counter space. Just toast your bread under the broiler of your oven. Sure, you have to flip the bread, but you can do a whole bunch at one time if you're making lots of toast.

You might think "Gee, that's a waste of electricity" using an entire oven to make toast. Where I live, electricity is under $0.15/kwh. It takes about 3 minutes to toast bread on both sides. That works out to about $0.0105 to make toast. If a toaster costs $20, it would take me about 1904 uses of the toaster to pay for itself, not including the electricity the toaster uses. And that's assuming I'm only make the number of slices the toaster can handle (say, 2 or 4?) and not more in the oven.

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In my case the primary benefit of a toaster is that it requires minimal intervention, not energy efficiency.

When I'm trying to get multiple small humans dressed and fed in the morning I prefer to put all the slices in a toaster oven and set the automatic timer. If I used the oven broiler I would have to manually set timers to remind me to run back to the kitchen and flip the bread. And of course if I forget or can't make it back to the kitchen in time then it doesn't take many burnt-on-one-side pieces of toast to equal the cost of a toaster.

I agree that there are niche kitchen gadgets that are not worth the space but it depends on the person. For example, I do not have a dedicated coffee machine, but many people consider theirs indispensable.

I understand, but if you can't find 3 minutes to make toast, just get up 3 minutes earlier.

I respect that you would be willing to sacrifice three minutes of sleep for toast without a toaster. However, I am working to increase my sleep back to a healthy amount including physical therapy, setting better boundaries at work, and outsourcing a lot of low-value "just a few minutes" kinds of tasks that are individually small but cumulatively add up.

If I can spend $50 and half a square foot of counter space to get an extra 3 minutes of sleep every day I would do that in a heartbeat. If I could pay $1,000 and ten square feet of counter space to get an extra hour a day I'd do that in a heartbeat too.

Our differing life circumstances make our tradeoffs different, though I will admit that I aspire to become time-rich enough someday to afford luxuries like spending three minutes a day making toast without a toaster.

Fair, you may be the edge case that benefits greatly from a dedicated toasting appliance.

I may be, though given the popularity of dedicated toasting appliances, have you considered the possibility that it's not really an edge case?

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