In one week, I celebrate my 53rd Birthday. I decided that, while this wasn’t some multiple of five, it’s still a big event. I never thought I’d live this long, and to celebrate, I’m offering a whopper of a deal on the first year of a paid subscription. How big? Try 53 percent! Time is limited on this, and there will be no extensions. Or, if you’re already a member and want to be epically awesome, you can hit up my Ko-Fi account .
Photo by Kate Ibragimova on Unsplash
Things should be made to last. More than that, we should not just be able to fix them, but be encouraged to do so. The problem is that most of us don’t know how to do our own repairs anymore.
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And that’s a big part of ending our disposable culture, in my view. My 26 years of marriage has required some repairs, as have our cars, our home, some of our clothes, and so many other things. Things shouldn’t be considered disposable except for exceptions like toilet paper and Kleenex.
Which is why I’m glad to see this is playing in Peoria .
Reduce, reuse, repair, learn and belong were elements of the Peoria Repair Café’s latest event Saturday at the North Branch Library.
Repair cafés have popped up around the world since the first known one opened in 2009 in Amsterdam. Jennifer Brady and Nikki Merz Andrews formed Peoria’s about a year ago, with their first event in October 2025.
They typically host local events every three months, when volunteers can use their expertise in sewing, leather work, garden tool maintenance, IT, bicycle repair, appliances, electronics, etc. to help people fix their possessions for free. They may even teach someone to do further maintenance and upkeep. Participants also can swap DIY supplies or clothes.
“There’s some basic things about mechanics that not everybody’s gonna know, and the user manual doesn’t tell you that,” Brady said. “It’s just kind of learning about how things work.”
The Peoria Repair Café [PRC] has at least 10 steady volunteers who regularly help teach and repair at events, and eight or nine new volunteers showed up Saturday. Three volunteers perform the day-to-day tasks of the organization that runs off donations.
This is fan-freaking-tastic, because it’s not just dealing with our disposable culture, but it’s people stepping up and not expecting the government to do it for them. Sure, Uncle Sam probably could put something like this together, but then there would be committees and strings attached for all the participants; it would be a nightmare!
But having a place where people can go, swap goods, learn skills, all because it’s just there and they can use it is beyond awesome in my book.
It seems that the cafe in Peoria is far from the only one .
Even if we want to fix things the way Randy does, it’s increasingly difficult to find someone who can do it. There were 100,000 shoe repair shops in the U.S. in the 1930s ; today there are only around 5,000. You’d be hard-pressed to find a place to fix small appliances like toasters or microwaves — a Google search states that there are “zero dedicated storefront repair shops” in San Francisco. Low-cost fast fashion, meanwhile, all but encourages disposability. The vast majority of consumer items are deliberately designed to become obsolete.
We are losing the ability to not only fix a thing but understand the mechanisms that operate it. And the relationships created in that teaching.
New efforts in the Bay Area, however, are starting to offer a different path.
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In San Francisco’s Haight neighborhood, Claire Bonham-Carter has been operating the Haight-NOPA Repair Cafe for nearly a year. Bonham-Carter, a climate adaptation consultant and former director of sustainable development at AECOM, said she was motivated by a desire to reduce waste, save money and resources, share skills and foster community in the process. She was also inspired by a friend who runs the Chiswick Repair Cafe in London.
This is global, and that’s a very good thing.
Yes, there is probably a lot of leftist rhetoric driving this sort of thing, stuff about carbon footprints and climate change or even just filling up the landfills, but I honestly don’t give a damn.
Being able to fix things means you’re not buying something else. That means you’ve got those funds for something else. Sure, you might piss it away at the bar instead, but that’s your choice. It still creates economic opportunity because it helps pay the bartender, the wait staff, the guy washing dishes in the back—I’ve been that guy, and he’s not paid enough—and everyone else.
That’s still a good thing, overall, and it’s because you learned how to mend a piece of clothing instead of tossing it and buying something new that will fall apart in a year.
In my mind, fixing this is preferable to disposing of it. I still remember the feeling when a relatively new DVD player stopped working, and the person at the manufacturer said they just replaced the warranty cases because it wasn’t cost-effective to fix them. That made no sense to me. I mean, I can see it, but it’s still baffling that we’ve reached this point as a society.
Cheap goods, though, aren’t cheap.
If you have to replace something every few years, the costs accumulate. Yet, if we have a culture of repairing things, of making them usable again for still more years, then we completely change the shape of everything.
No more being beholden to global powers who do not have our best interests at heart. No more having to budget for replacement items out of your paycheck because it’s inevitable that everything will break sooner or later and have to get tossed. No more relying on a corporation’s desire to force you into the new model because it’s better for their bottom line.
It’s our stuff. We should have the right to keep it for as long as we want.
More importantly, though, we should have the power to maximize our chances of doing that, too.
These repair cafes are cool, and I hope to see more of them. Buy good things, keep them running for the rest of your life, give the system a big middle finger.
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A promising development
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at TomKnighton.