Tough Times Quote by John Hawley

Hard luck, delivered in the plain, almost accountant-like language of survival. John Hawley isn’t crafting a maxim; he’s logging the slow grind of a household or small enterprise getting squeezed from both sides: market forces on one end, mechanical catastrophe on the other. The phrase "had to endure" frames economic change as something endured like weather or illness, not negotiated. A "serious reduction in the price of goods" sounds like good news to consumers, but here it lands as a threat - likely a collapse in what Hawley could charge for what he made or sold. The market doesn’t care about his margins; it just happens to him.

Then the sentence turns sharply from abstract economics to blunt material fragility: "our glost oven fell while firing". The detail is vivid because it’s so specific. A "glost" (or "glost") oven points to pottery or glazing work - a kiln used for finishing wares - which means the earlier price drop isn’t theoretical. It’s tied to production, inventory, livelihood. When the oven fails mid-firing, it’s not only "considerable damage" to equipment; it’s ruined goods, lost time, and the sudden need for capital ("necessary to build a new one") precisely when income is already under pressure.

The subtext is an unwritten argument about precarity: a small producer can be competent and diligent and still be wrecked by a bad market season and one structural failure. The lack of self-pity is its own rhetorical move, suggesting a culture where complaint is less useful than record-keeping, and where endurance is the only available strategy.