> Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)...
I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads:
> looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sharp enough to peel a carrot.
Is this deliberate, or did the author not notice a core problem right there, in their own shopping behavior?
As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...
Especially in the kitchen some good stuff still exists. It's expensive, heavy - and lasts. Unfortunately you won't find those in many of the regular shops. In my city - Nuremberg, Germany - I only see that kind of (expensive) quality in a single specialized store (Kitchen Loesch, https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/). I myself was not aware of the kinds of good appliances that are still made until I went through the lower levels of that store for the first time. I too only knew the stuff most people know, which does not last long, visible at first glance already, with all the cheap plastics it's made of. Much of the better stuff is heavy and mostly made of metal. Even the hand blenders there almost all cost above 100 Euros, far more than I was used to seeing. On the other hand, those devices looked like they would last for a very long time, not like that shitty plastics Philipps model I own. Unfortunately it's not nearly the same to see pictures online, having the actual appliance right in front of you is very different as far as I can tell after that experience of actually seeing them there. The impression of solidity just does not transmit via some online shopping website picture.