Someone asked in the comments "can't you just go into any store and buy paper clips" and my response was "yeah and they'll all be fraudulent garbage because brands don't exist anymore." To make my point, I went down the "stationary" aisle at Safeway while I was buying salad fixins and grabbed some extremely respectable looking clips from Charles Leonard Inc. - headquarters Hauppauge, NY., but made in Taiwan.
I am not remotely a "hurr hurr made in america" shitwad, but making paperclips is so fucking easy that there is absolutely no reason to do it overseas. If what they're selling is simply bent steel wire, then the cost of shipping can't make sense versus making it here. The US manufacturing core is obliterated, I'll grant you, but we make steel, wire is one of the fundamental primitives output by that process, and a machine to bend wire into paperclips is simple, cheap, and will run unattended for 200 years with only a weekly oiling. There is no reason to import paperclips. If they're made of steel.
Sure enough, the CLI ones are not. I could tell as soon as I picked one up; I think it's chromed aluminum, probably because that weighs less, and thus costs less to ship. It can be bent several times, so it's not something like zinc, but it's certainly too lightweight, it doesn't make the right sound when you tap two together, and - wonder of wonders - the plating started flaking off all over my hands.
The ACCO ones are the right weight, they make the right sound, and they don't fucking disintegrate. Clips
