Made In The USA, Mystery Edition: Razor Blades

In which the author asks for help, and can perhaps help you as well

It occurred to me the other day that this Substack fits the approximate definition of that oft-derided term “safe space”, particularly on the subscribers-only side. This is a place where men can discuss the things that matter to us, in relative obscurity, and without the fear of getting “dunked on” by women and/or the creatures known as “orbiters”.

ACF, like Abercrombie&Fitch on its founding or T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, is exclusively aimed at traditional men attempting to live by the traditional values of their culture, be that culture Western or Eastern, something for which I do not apologize. I have very few female readers and I bet I’d know most of them on sight; they’re cool in any event, and some of them are more autistic/deranged than I am, even. As for orbiters/wannabes/”allies”, I have no compunction about slicing them right off the subscriber list, even if they’re paid subscribers.

What’s an “orbiter”, you ask? The phrase generally refers to a man who is obsessed with, or who obsessively interacts with, a woman with whom he is not having sex. Even the best of us have probably “orbited” once or twice in our lives, usually when we were young and naive. But if you’re a grown man who has a “real emotional connection” with a woman in any environment where she has to pretend to like you, such as if she’s your waitress or stripper or car salesperson or white-collar subordinate, then you’re an orbiter and I have some advice for you: either have some self-respect and quit, or take the safety off the Mossberg before you get your toe in the trigger and your lips on the muzzle, lest your attempt to “shoot your shot” be as pathetic with a 12-gauge as it was with a dinner-and-drinks invite. Worse yet, if you’re busy defending women in general on the Internet as a self-appointed “ally”, as opposed to orbiting one in particular, then you’re beyond saving and you probably don’t own a gun, so just, I don’t know, pick a tall building or something.

Back on topic: Now when I say “the things that matter to us”, I’m not talking about rape or harassment or “locker room talk” or all the shit about which HR “professionals” obsess on a daily basis: I mean the important stuff, like:

Is someone counterfeiting USA-made razor blades?

What you’re about to read is a typically male story of short-term obsession and detail-orientation. You’ve been warned. It’s not too late to close the browser and head over to EliteDaily, The Gen Z Destination For Women; they are currently running a story titled “How To Dopamine Dress For Every 2022 Holiday Scenario.”

Still with me? Good. Our story started yesterday, when I was suffering through about the forty-third fiftieth of unpacking my old house into my new one. The fact that in February I threw out enough previously-cherished items to fill two dumpsters, one box truck, and nine 3/4-ton pickup truck beds doesn’t mean I’m not still confronted with dozens if not hundreds of mystery boxes and crates in my new digs.

One of those boxes hadn’t been touched in fifteen years, at least; I established this by carbon-dating the newest item in said box, which was the 2006 schedule for the Ohio Valley Region of the SCCA. It contained a rusty old-style box cutter, as seen below:

Note that it is no longer rusty: that’s because this particular box cutter is significant to me. When I was just out of high school I worked a summer as a night janitor at the food brokerage partially owned by my father, breaking down and throwing out dozens of boxes a day. The office was always filled to the brim with various minor consumables like pens and box cutters, printed with the brand name of whatever the old man was trying to get into the grocery stores at the time. Somehow this “Actifed Plus” cutter came home with me one day and never left. It probably spent close to twenty years in a BMX toolbox before going into a cardboard box and disappearing.

I spent the better part of an hour with ScotchBrite, penetrating oil, and 200-grit sandpaper cleaning the cutter back up. I’d planned on throwing the razor blade away because it looked like shit but then I noticed that it was marked “Made In USA” so I ScotchBrited it up as well then ran it across a whetstone for a little bit, perhaps doing more harm than good.

Naturally, this sent me down a rabbit hole later on in the evening, where I discovered that Amazon has ALL SORTS of USA-made single-edge razors and box cutters. Good news, right? Except I have a sort of sixth sense for prose and it was flat fucking obvious to me that all of these USA-made razors were being marketed in much the same English-adjacent prose used to sell various USB cables and low-end consumer-electronic goods elsewhere on Amazon. Nor did the company names — CANOPUS? WEUPE? — inspire much confidence. The Canopus site wasn’t written by a native speaker. They claim to have a variety of products made in the USA, but their claim to have US-made masks has been disputed on a health-and-beauty blog.

The same is true for WEUPE, an abandoned trademark filed by Vitamax for a California warehouse address not too far from CANOPUS.

I would bet even money that the CANOPUS/WEUPE products are made in China with “MADE IN USA” stamped on there in clear violation of US law. Nothing shocking about that. Amazon regularly seizes millions of dollars’ worth of counterfeit products from their own fulfillment warehouses and once claimed that they have removed over ten billion counterfeit listings from the site. My guess is they are so busy trying to keep their Chinese “partners” from selling drywall paste as baby formula, they have no time or inclination to verify country-of-origin claims for low-cost razor blades.

All of that said, there still has to be a supplier of single-edge razor blades in this country, right? So I started combing through dozens of listings across the Internet, trying to get a sense for how the different razors, cutters, and scrapers were made. I kept coming across references to the American Safety Razor company, which made razor blades in the United States for various private label companies. They’re now a part of Edgewell, which does quite a bit of manufacturing in the USA but doesn’t choose to say what they make here.

Earlier today I spoke with Hardedge Tool in northern Kentucky; they confirmed that they have USA-made single-edge blades for 23 cents per in high-carbon and 40 cents per in stainless. But they don’t make them in-house, and could only say that they come from “suppliers”.

Hyde Manufacturing, a company I tracked down via a patent on USA-labeled scrapers sold by ATD Manufacturing through distributors, makes their scrapers in the United States but their blades in China. ATD themselves didn’t return my question as to why their “09” single-edge blades of .009” thickness are “imported” but the .012” blades are USA.

Rather amusingly, all “American Line” razor blades are made in Mexico.

Other than the ATD .012” blades, the only mainline reputable sources I could fine for a USA-made single edge were IDL Tools of New Jersey via Menards and a few online distributors and this remarkably reassuring listing at Razor Blade Company:

The All-American .009" Single Edge Blade is our latest product, luanched in 2020, with all materials and manufacturing orginating from the USA, including the box!

We guarantee this blade's consistent quality and performance. Constructed with American steel, this blade has slightly less flex than standard baldes and a longer lasting edge. Ideal for both cutting and scraping applications. Fits all standard single edge blade knvies and tools. Individually wrapped for safety. A great value for anyone looking to improve costs and blade performance while supporting US manufacturing and US Steel industries.

They’re dirt-cheap, too, at 3.9 cents per — but the shipping costs are murder and considerably exceed the price of the blades themselves. You might as well spend $1.09 per item on some Personna-braded, USA-made scrapers in which to mount them. The presence of the Personna brand, which is owned by Edgewell, on current stock scrapers makes me think Edgewell does in fact have some blade production here as well. The PAL blue blades and GEM normal blades were made in the USA prior to the Edgewell acquisition; if you want to be sure, there are a few dozen new-old-stock boxes on eBay.

I’ve decided that I’m going to get to the bottom of this made-in-USA blade business. That means finding the root source of the supply, figuring out which brands are actually having blades made in the USA, and then testing all of the blades to see which one is best. Towards that end, I’ve bought a sharpness tester similar to what you see on Project Farm and elsewhere. I’m also in the process of buying different blades.

Here is where I need your help.

If you know anything about where these blades might be made, even a hunch, either comment or email me. If you’re interested in supporting this completely idiotic mission to find the blades and then figure out whether the USA-made ones are, in fact, better, then please consider becoming an ACF subscriber — if you are not already in the club, that is.

Although my Made In The USA articles are always free to all subscribers, and whatever I learn in terms of production will also be shared with all subscribers, the results of the COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY RAZOR BLADE TESTING will be for paid subscribers only. Trust me, you’ll want to read it.

And that’s where we could close this story, except for one thing: I don’t want my readers to think they’re supporting another daddy’s-money millionaire wannabe writer like Carlos Maza or Taylor Lorenz or… a bunch of other people I could name. So here’s a story: About twenty years ago, a bunch of food brokerages were consolidated into a single nationwide entity via an aggressive purchase plan that made multi-millionaires out of several Midwesterners. My father wasn’t among them; correctly sensing that the business was past its sell-by date, he left. It was sheer luck that his former partner got rich. And while I’m not saying that my dad didn’t do well afterwards, it had nothing to do with me and I haven’t asked him for any money since the Clinton Administration. I am entirely responsible for my own failures, I mean successes, nowadays.

One of the other food brokers who did get rich in the acquisitions had a son about my age who, like me, had gotten a low-paying nepotism gig in the Eighties — but he’d never done much beyond that. And why should he, when his father was so willing to pay his bills, buy him a house, help him open a couple of businesses, and just feather his nest in general? He really didn’t have to much except smoke weed all day and go to the strip club at night. That was where he fell in love with a stripper. So much so that he married her in Sun Valley at tremendous expense. Obviously he didn’t want her dancing any more, so he paid for her to attend beautician school.

A week after graduating from hair school, the woman in question had a job in a Columbus suburb. Two months after that, some reprobate in a green Audi showed up to get his hair cut and drew her by pure chance. A year after that, the former food broker sat the former stripper down and made her an offer: he would tear up his son’s pre-nup and make her a millionaire if she’d stay with the son. It was the only way he could see getting a grandchild at any point in the future. The former stripper told the former food broker that she’d rather be broke with me than rich with his son.

So it turns out that my dad was not totally unknown to this dude and vice versa. It didn’t surprise my dad that his former competitor and the progeny of same were in the pay-to-play market — and it apparently didn’t surprise the other guy that my father’s son was out there borrowing people’s wives in overpriced European luxury cars. Nature over nurture, I suppose.

A few years ago I heard a rumor from a friend of a friend that the artist formerly known as Vodka McBigbra had reconnected with the aforementioned fortunate son to some degree after I kicked her out of my house. I hope she ended up getting a few bucks out of the fellow. Maybe they remarried!

It wouldn’t surprise me. Some of these simps want to use you / some of them want to get used by you. But that’s the thing about orbiters; once they are in motion, they tend to stay in motion. No disappointment, no revelation, no humiliation is strong enough to bring them back down to earth. Who knows what lies they tell themselves, in their whirlwind spin around the women who will never love them no matter what they do? Perhaps it’s this: I’m no orbiter — I’m an astronaut!