Why is shopping at Amazon so awful? It presents dozens of brands you’ve never heard of, and appallingly bad filtering options. And since 8% of the 1-star reviews are “It broke after X weeks”, let me filter for products by length and quality of warranty! I complained about the brain-dead-ness of its “Rufus AI” but the generally terrible experience applies even without AI getting it wrong.
We bought a Cuisinart Perfectemp cordless electric kettle years ago. Pretty good, but:
- The water level indicator is behind the handle, hard to view, eventually gets milky and even harder to read.
- The hole that lets the water flow into the indicator gets clogged so the water level doesn’t match the water level in the kettle.
- The hole and the water level indicator are impossible to clean.
- Shaking the kettle to get the water level to equalize may have caused the kettle to leak from the bottom after years.
Filter fiasco
The separate water indicator. is stupid Just give me a glass kettle so I can see the water level! So let’s go to Amazon and shop for a glass kettle. Search for “electric kettle temperature control”, get over 1,000 results. So use the handy filter to filter for Glass, and most of the results are still not-glass kettles. Useless!
Warranty ought to be a mark of quality
Alright, so I’ll just visually scan for glass electric kettles. There are dozens. Are Brightown, Chefman, Comfee, COSORI, Elite Gourmet, Magic Mill, and NELO reputable companies making quality goods? Who knows? Click on 1-star reviews and there are plenty of people and/or bots paid by competitors complaining that the product broke in X weeks. So which companies stand behind their product with two-year or longer warranty? Amazon usually provides the useless and probably illegal cop-out:
Please contact the seller directly for warranty information for this product. You may also be able to find warranty information on the manufacturer’s website.
Reading more reviews, it seems many people give up and believe after the return period expires, there’s nothing they can do. All products have warranties, and your credit card probably doubles the warranty period. But it seems even reputable companies like Bodun and OXO fob off customers with requirements like “demonstrate proof of purchase to the company you purchased it from.”
On the flip side, with generative AI it’s trivial to make “cameraphone picture of a crumpled receipt for a Cuisinart kettle for $58.75” and even make a “shaky phone video demonstrating that a kettle is broken.” So I have some sympathy for manufacturers trying to stem the tide of returned goods. But companies should want to interact with customers in order to improve their products! Making and selling products is so broken in the 21st century; the gulf between people begging for a “KEEP WARM” setting on the kettle that defaults to OFF and the Chinese factory that cranked out a batch of 5,000 kettles four months ago is vast.
aarke! An exception
We don’t waste money on bottled or canned water, instead we drink filtered tap water. Brita is OK but the plastic pitcher gets scratched and worn, the plastic lid breaks, and throwing a plastic filter in the trash every two months or so is dispiriting. We found aarke selling a glass water pitcher with a stainless steel filter that you refill, thus a lot less plastic. It seems high quality, and the company has actual customer service. I let them know about a typo in the manual, and a human being replied. Amazing!
Unfortunately, aarke’s kettle is double-walled stainless steel (and costs €250, and the excellent 5-year warranty only applies in the E.U. or UK).
