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The lesson from the KitchenAid grave? Buy cheap

As I watched the junk guy take my KitchenAid fridge away yesterday, I went to my happy place to see if I learned anything from my experience with appliance ownership.

As you may know, my seven-year-old fridge bit the dust on the weekend. It was taken to wherever dead fridges go, somewhere perhaps like the desolate world of Walle where the 30-year-old Amana beer fridge lies in a heap next to the KitchenAid, an old man sitting next to a kid who took crack one too many times.

It's so depressing to think about the appliance cemetery because fridges like ours can't even be refurbished. They'll just lay there until the planet explodes from cow farts and freons.

My intuition tells me that the geniuses who get rich selling appliances have finally figured out that they can't make money selling fridges to people who keep them for 30 years so they install innards that are designed to become obsolete in a few years, just like Pontiac Sunfires.

After I wrote that post, I received many comments from people who have been betrayed by their major appliances and the companies that make them. One friend told me about a nightmare she encountered after she purchased one of the fou-fou fancy built-in appliance sets from that country that cannot be trusted, France. The pieces were okay, but the customer service was crap.

In my case, the KitchenAid was a high end fridge, not the sort one would expect die young, but it did. This is a worry to me because all my other appliances are KitchenAid -- the stove, the mixer, the blender, even the food processor. These appliances were supposed to be high quality. Chef Lynn Crawford says so right there on their website.

Hey Lynn, maybe it's time for a new gig. I, for one, will never trust you with food again.

Any way, it's water under the compressor. It's time to move on.

But who do I trust?

What I did learn was that KitchenAid isn't KitchenAid. It's Whirlpool. So I decided against getting a fridge made by Whirlpool which doesn't answer its damned phone or respond to posts from irate bloggers. So I decided to buy from a competitor.

Unfortunately, my intrepid cousin Dawn Simpson Facebooked me the following from Wiki:

KitchenAid is an American home appliance brand owned by Whirlpool Corporation. The company markets Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Gladiator GarageWorks, Inglis, Estate, Brastemp, Bauknecht and Consul. After acquiring the Maytag Corporation on March 31, 2006, the Whirlpool Corporation surpassed Electrolux to become "the largest home appliance maker in the world.

Oh shit.

I was hoping to try out a Maytag because, well, remember the commercials? The Maytag repairman, the loneliest man in town?

Do you think it's a coincidence that that commercial doesn't air anymore?

You hear from Kelly Ripa all about extra bottom shelves and fridges that even have a cake drawer.

But dependability? It's no longer job one.

There is only one option.

Buy cheap.

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