Entry-level Model Fitter roles pay $24/hour; full benefits package includes one complimentary Bespoke Model per household per year
The Bespoke AI Model factory opened Thursday and immediately announced it is hiring 150 new employees, with a particular interest in candidates who have experience in “any form of skilled or precision work — manufacturing, healthcare, education, skilled trades, anything where getting it right matters more than getting it done fast.”
The job posting, which went live on the factory’s website at precisely 11:01 a.m. — one minute after the ribbon fell — outlines several position types: Model Fitters ($24/hr.), Calibration Analysts ($28-32/hr.), RLHF Specialists ($30-35/hr.), and a range of support and administrative roles. All positions include full health and dental benefits, a pension plan, and what the company calls “the most unusual benefit in modern employment”: a complimentary Bespoke AI Model, fitted for the employee, provided at no charge after six months of employment.
“We want our workers to use the product they’re making,” said H.R. Director Patrice Dombrowicz. “Not as a perk. As a philosophy. The best cobblers wear their own shoes. The best tailors wear their own suits. The best model-fitters should have a model that knows them and that they know.”
Applications are available at the factory front desk or at http://www.theinternetlives.net/jobs.
Model Fitter I
$24/hr. • Full-time • No exp. req.
Entry-level intake specialist
Calibration Analyst
$28–32/hr. • Full-time
2+ yrs. technical or analytical work
RLHF Specialist
$30–35/hr. • Full-time
Strong written communication req.
Operations Coordinator
$22/hr. • Full-time
Admin. background preferred
3rd Shift Supervisor
$36/hr. • Full-time, nights
Management exp. required
Apply: theinternetlives.net/jobs
Or in person: 400 Commerce Ave.
Economic dependency is real, acknowledged; “healthy company town energy” is the phrase the mayor uses, which is a phrase worth unpacking
Mayor Voss uses the term “company town” without apparent discomfort, which is interesting because the term has historically carried connotations — labor suppression, corporate paternalism, the scrip-and-the-company-store dynamic that darkened the history of many a Midwestern mill town — that most civic officials would avoid.
“I know the history,” Voss said when asked. “I grew up in it. My father’s whole life was organized around one employer. And the company towns that went wrong went wrong for specific reasons that we are specifically designing against. We’re not the only employer. We’re the main employer. There’s a difference.”
He paused. “Also, we have a union contract. That’s column one on the ledger.”
Third-generation hardware family; Adele Spindler holds strong opinions about the correct screw for a given application
Spindler’s Hardware & Sundries, which opened its doors Thursday at 122 Main Street, is the kind of store that the modern hardware megachain cannot replicate because it is organized around one person’s knowledge of hardware rather than one company’s knowledge of retail. That person is Adele Spindler, fifty-three, whose grandfather opened Spindler’s Hardware in Antigo in 1952 and whose mother kept it going until 2019, when Adele bought it, updated the plumbing section (“people are very particular about plumbing now”), and eventually moved it here.
“My grandfather could tell you the exact screw for any application without looking at a box,” she said. “I can do that too. It is a skill I take very seriously and that people think is funny until they need a specific screw at 6 p.m. on a Friday.”
Filtered through a Great Lakes skepticism: our resident technology writer explains why this town’s model may have a better future than some assume
The consumer AI market in 2026 is, by the analysis of most informed observers, a landscape of overlapping capabilities, undifferentiated products, and a user base that is simultaneously exhausted by too many AI tools and uncertain how to live without them. The companies selling these tools are, by and large, enormous, and the products they sell are, by and large, good enough.
Good enough. That is the phrase that matters here. The Bespoke AI Model factory is betting — betting the town, in a sense — that “good enough” is not enough for a significant segment of the market. That there is a class of consumer, and perhaps eventually a class of enterprise, that will pay for better than good enough. For something that was made specifically for them, not just tuned for their demographic.
Whether they’re right is the question. This newspaper will cover the answer as it develops.
Orville Henke, 61, operator of the franchise, said Thursday afternoon that opening-day sales exceeded his projections by approximately 15 percent. “People needed groceries,” he said. “They needed a place to buy them. That’s a business.”
First Internet Savings Bank, a community bank organized specifically to serve the town’s financial needs, opened its Main Street branch Thursday. Branch Manager Louise Wrotek said the toaster promotion — a genuine 2-slot Sunbeam, she clarified, not the 4-slot — was “a nod to a better era of banking, when the bank was your neighbor.”
Commercial real estate along Commerce Avenue and the adjacent block of Main Street has seen “very strong initial interest,” according to town development coordinator Mira Zablocki. Three restaurant concepts have signed leases, including a diner, a Polish kitchen, and a pizza place. A barbershop has also signed. Names to be announced.
The town’s first business license was issued at 9 a.m. Thursday to The Internet (the company), License No. 0001. By 5 p.m., 47 additional licenses had been issued. Town Clerk Lorraine Misko called it “a strong opening day for the business community.” Rod Black asked that the Tribune’s license number not be printed in this story. It is License No. 0023.