Regular loaves of bread have pre-slicing technology figured out, so what is it with bagels and English muffins?

A properly-sliced bagel would be the best thing since sliced bread.

by properly sliced, I assume you mean like this:

you monster, you.
- No, that's just evil.
- Lmao legit thought this was sliced chicken breast 😅
- Lol. Grew up an hour from St Louis and I still don't know how people prefer sliced bagels like those. I like to butter my bagels or some other schmear. I don't want to eat a dry bagel and I also don't want to walk around with a dip

In Germany, English muffins are pre-sliced 90% of the way.

That said: Fresh cut bread tastes better anyway.

I don’t want my English muffins sliced at all, personally, and I agree about freshly sliced bread…

…but…

In the US, pre-sliced bagels are the worst. They’re the fucking worst! In a package of 6 bagels, at least 4 will not be sliced in the middle, so you get one “half” with 75% of the bagel, and the other “half” just disintegrates. Of the ones that are sliced in the middle, they leave a line of uncut area for godknowswhy and trying to tear it apart usually fucks up one of the halves.

One shouldn’t have to pull out a sharp knife to open a pre-sliced bagel!

And don’t even get me started on toasters with a bagel function…
- You don't "open" a bagel like a pop can, that's why they're ripping.
  
  You "twist" it like a bottle, and it should split evenly 99% of the time.
  
  The middle being connected is so you don't just have a bag of bagel halves.
- Wait, what's wrong with toasters that have a bagel function? It's way better than toasters that don't. Only toasting the open faced side of the bagel means you are still able to touch the outside without burning your fingers while the inside is actually toasted enough to be crispy. Without the bagel setting on a toaster, the only other option you have is a toaster oven or doing it by stove top. Toaster is way more convenient than either of those.
  
  Unless you mean cheap toasters that have a poorly implemented bagel option, rather than full separate control of all heating elements. But you didn't specify cheap toasters. A good toaster is pretty important, so don't buy it at wal-mart, and don't get a cheap one from a proper store either. A top of the line toaster is a pretty cheap luxury, spoil yourself in an affordable way.
- This is because they know if you are buying a bag of pre-sliced bagels you don’t care about quality and they figure they can just phone it in.

Idk about other countries but you can buy pre sliced bagels in the uk

It's not that they're not "pre-sliced" it's that they're pre-sliced poorly. Either they're still connected in the middle and trying to cleanly pull them apart is frustratingly rare or they're sliced unevenly resulting in a 80/20 bagel experience. All too often it can be both.
- First job was panera bread many moons ago. The bagel slicer is essentially a chute with a saw blade. Sometimes an oblong bagel would slice badly, or the blade would come loose, resulting in poor performance.
  
  The technology exists, and certainly could be improved, but that costs money and god forbid innovation eat into profits 🥯
The same with, as we call them here, regular muffins.
- What do you call muffins then??

While you were dicking around with sliced loaves, we were studying the blade.

Now we can slice our own bakery products.

Well, for Thomas' English muffin all you have to do is little squeeze around the whole edges until it comes apart. No knife nor fork required.

Yum crumbs. Unless you developed the touch.

I get pre-sliced bagels and English muffins all the time... 🤨

Maybe check out other brands than what you've been buying?

Bay's English muffins are superior to others and are perfectly presliced.

Muffins shouldn't be neatly sliced. Make the internal surface as rough as possible to hold more melted butter.

That's what the air pockets are for

We used to get a brand of bagels here that were fully pre-sliced because they were in the same style of bag as a loaf of bread. So being fully sliced wasn't a problem, they weren't gonna shuffle around in that bag. Not sure why they aren't all like that. Also despite being fully sliced, they did still stick together a little bit while fresh. But it was only their humidity holding them together, once they got a bit stale the halves fell apart from eachother.

But yeah, not sure why that is so rare, I can't think of a downside to it that other manufacturers are trying to avoid. Maybe different types of bagels need different solutions? The ones we used to get were cinnamon raisin.

Our frozen bagels are mostly fine 🤷‍♂️