You have been opening cans wrong your entire life, and you don’t even know it.

I don’t mean wrong in the sense that you’re doing it incorrectly. I mean wrong in the sense that you have been engaged in a low-grade, daily act of unnecessary violence — against yourself, against the can, and against the entire concept of kitchen convenience — and you have simply accepted it as normal.

You know what you did last Tuesday. You had a can of black beans. You needed the black beans. So you did what you always do: you opened the junk drawer, found the flathead screwdriver that has been sitting there since the Obama administration, stabbed the lid of the can approximately eleven times in a circle that could generously be described as “cylindrical,” and then used your fingers to pry back the jagged metal edges while muttering things that would get you banned from a幼儿园.

This is your life. This is what you do.

The can opener you own — the manual one, the one with the handle that has been getting progressively harder to turn since 2019, the one where the cutting wheel is so dull it now merely suggests to the can that it might consider opening — that can opener has been retired. Not officially. There was no ceremony. It just quietly stopped working one day, and instead of replacing it, you adapted. You became a person who opens cans with hand tools and rage.

There is a better way. It costs fifteen dollars. It does the one thing it was invented to do, and it does it every single time, and it does it while you stand there doing literally nothing.

It’s called an electric can opener. You’ve heard of them. You’ve seen them in other people’s kitchens. You’ve probably made fun of them. “Who needs an electric can opener?” you said, to no one, while prying the lid off a can of diced tomatoes with a pair of kitchen shears like a person who has been asked to leave the hardware store.

Here is what an electric can opener does: it opens the can. That’s it. That is the entire pitch. You put the can under it, press a button, and the can opens. You do not have to turn anything. You do not have to stab anything. You do not have to develop a specific callus on your right thumb that only exists because of this one task. The can opens. You proceed with your life.

The absurdity is that this is a solved problem. This was solved decades ago. The electric can opener has been sitting in kitchens since the 1960s, waiting for you to stop pretending that your manual method is “fine.” It is not fine. Your manual method involves a screwdriver, a prayer, and the kind of tactical hand positioning usually reserved for disarming explosives.

I watched a YouTube video of a man opening a can of chickpeas with an electric can opener. He pressed the button, looked at his phone for six seconds, and the can was open. He didn’t even watch it happen. The can opener did the entire job while he was reading a tweet about a guy who opened a can of chickpeas with a screwdriver.

That guy was you. The tweet was about you.

“But I don’t open cans that often.” You open cans every day. Tomato sauce. Beans. Coconut milk. That can of tomato paste you bought in 2023 because you were going to make pasta sauce from scratch and then didn’t. The can of soup you eat at 11 PM when you can’t sleep and you’re pretending it’s “dinner.” You open cans constantly. You’ve just normalized the violence.

Think about the last time you opened a can. Be honest. What happened? Did you open it cleanly, with a smooth, continuous motion, like a person who has their life together? Or did you stab it four times, saw the lid partially off, and then use your fingers to finish the job while hoping the tetanus shot was still current?

I know the answer. You know the answer. The can knows the answer. The can has been through a lot.

The electric can opener is the single most under-purchased kitchen appliance in America. More people own air fryers than can openers. More people own bread makers — bread makers! — than can openers. You bought a bread maker, used it twice, and it’s been sitting on your counter collecting dust since March. But you won’t buy a fifteen-dollar device that opens every can in your kitchen while you do nothing.

You know what your current can-opening method has in common with your bread maker? You hate it. But at least the can opener method doesn’t cost you $89 and a square foot of counter space. It costs you blood, occasionally.

Here’s the thing about the manual can opener: it was never good. Go back and look at the history. The first manual can opener was invented in 1858. The can was invented in 1810. For forty-eight years, people opened cans by hammering them with rocks and chisels. Then someone made a manual can opener and everyone acted like the future had arrived. It hadn’t. It was still a blade on a stick. The future arrived when someone said “what if the stick moved by itself.”

“But what if I just buy cans with pull-tabs?” You do buy cans with pull-tabs. And you know what happens every single time? You pull the tab, it snaps off in your fingers, and now you’re back to the screwdriver. The pull-tab is a lie. It’s a marketing gimmick invented by the can industry to make you feel like you don’t need a can opener, so that when the tab inevitably breaks, you have to buy a can opener anyway. It’s the most successful long con in food packaging history.

I have a theory that the pull-tab was invented specifically to make people feel stupid. You pull it. It breaks. You look at it. You look at the can. You look at the screwdriver in the junk drawer. You think, “I could just use the screwdriver.” And then you do. And then you cut your finger. And then you eat the beans anyway, because you’ve already committed to this can of beans.

There are exactly two categories of people in this world: people who own an electric can opener, and people who pretend they don’t need one. The first group opens cans without thinking about it. The second group has a specific set of hand movements they perform every time they open a can, a routine so ingrained it has its own muscle memory, a routine that involves stabbing, prying, bleeding, and a muttered expletive.

You are in the second group. I can tell because you’re reading this. People in the first group don’t read articles about can openers. They just open cans and go about their day, because opening a can is not an event for them. It is not a project. It does not require a screwdriver, a prayer, and the kind of focused intensity usually reserved for defusing a bomb.

Let me tell you what happens when you own an electric can opener: you stop thinking about cans. This is not a joke. I’m being serious. When you have an electric can opener, a can of anything goes from “a project” to “a six-second task.” You don’t plan for it. You don’t prep for it. You don’t open the junk drawer and assess your tools. You just press a button.

The emotional difference between “I have to open this can” and “I press a button and the can opens” is the emotional difference between cleaning your house with a mop and cleaning your house with a robot vacuum. Except the robot vacuum costs $300 and the can opener costs $15. You’ve made the wrong choice. You’ve been making the wrong choice for years.

I want to address the person who is about to type “I just use a knife” in the comments. No. You do not just use a knife. You use a knife in the way that a person “just” performs surgery. With great danger, minimal skill, and a high probability of injury. The knife is not a can opener. The knife is a knife. You are using a knife to open a can. This is how people end up in urgent care with a story that starts with “so I was trying to open a can of coconut milk and…”

The electric can opener was invented so that you would stop doing this. So that you would stop using the wrong tool for the job. So that you would stop looking at a can of chickpeas the way a mountaineer looks at Everest. It is a can of chickpeas. Press a button. Eat the chickpeas.

“But I’ve been fine without one.” You have not been fine. You have been surviving. There is a difference. You survived opening a can of tomatoes with a screwdriver. You survived prying the lid off a can of beans with your fingers. You survived the time the manual can opener slipped and you nearly took off your thumbnail. You survived. You did not thrive. You did not enjoy the experience. You did not think “this is fine, I enjoy opening cans this way.” You thought “I hate this” and then you ate the beans anyway.

The beans were not the problem. The beans were never the problem. The beans were fine. The beans were waiting patiently in the can for you to open it with a device designed for the task, instead of the flathead screwdriver you borrowed from your father’s toolbox in 2014 and never returned.

People who own electric can openers don’t talk about them. They don’t need to. They don’t post about them on social media. They don’t write essays about them. They don’t have feelings about them. They press a button, the can opens, and they move on with their day, because opening a can is not supposed to be an experience. It is not supposed to be a memory. It is not supposed to be the thing that makes you mutter “son of a—” at 6 PM on a Tuesday while your family waits for dinner.

You are the only person in your household who thinks about can openers. Your family doesn’t know what you go through. They don’t see the blood. They don’t see the screwdriver. They don’t see you standing at the counter, jaw clenched, prying the lid off a can of tomato paste while the manual can opener hangs on the wall above you like a portrait of a former friend who let you down.

Here’s the real insult: the manual can opener is still in your kitchen. It’s hanging on a hook, or sitting in a drawer, or wedged behind the olive oil. It has not been used since 2021. It is a museum piece. It is a relic. It is the flip phone of kitchen tools. You keep it because you think, “what if the electric one breaks?” It won’t break. It opens cans. That’s all it does. It does the one thing it was built to do, and it will do it until the heat death of the universe.

But if it does break — if the electric can opener, against all odds and all logic, somehow fails — you know what you’ll do? You’ll go to the junk drawer. You’ll get the screwdriver. You’ll open the can. Because that’s what you do. That’s what you’ve always done. You are a person who opens cans with hand tools, and no amount of technology is going to change that about you.

Except it can. It costs $15. It plugs into the wall. It opens the can. You stand there. You do nothing. The can opens.