A Poor Kitchen Aid Experience
I have a serious rant about Kitchen Aid and I am putting the word out in the best way I know how: the Internet through E-mail and blogging. A poor product is one thing: anything man made can have flaws . . .but poor customer service is a CHOICE.

I received a new stand mixer for Christmas made by Kitchen Aid and sold at Sam's. Joe saved up for a very long time to get it for me in appreciation of my making pizza for him for 18 years.

It's performance was pathetic from day one but we managed to limp along for six months before it quit altogether. It's elliptical orbit was supposed to make better contact with the food it was mixing, but instead it made contact with the bowl, scratching it and completely throwing the bowl off it's pins. You could not begin to hold the bowl on to the machine even with both hands! It would heat up, give off the 'hot electrical' smell and quit.

When we called Kitchen Aid, their first response was that it was 'operator error.' Sorry folks, but after being a professional cook, I am smart enough to snap a bowl in place over two pins and a button spring snap at the back. It was insulting on top of having to cope with a mixer that did not live up to even the least of my expectations.

Joe, my hero, called them and they sent a replacement. It worked one time,then the next Sunday night while making pizza dough, got hot and quit in the middle of mixing 5 cups of bread flour. And the same little snippy customer dis-service agent argued that a 5-quart mixer should not have to handle that load. For thirty minutes she tried to tell him that it was customer error.

She then had the audacity to suggest we make half a pizza, wait half an hour and make the other half of the pizza. What planet does she live on? A $300 machine can't make a single crust pizza? Does that mean I make a half of a loaf of bread at a time, too? That machine should make half a dozen loaves of bread every day of the week for years for that kind of money.

Joe asked to speak to a supervisor and read the instructions right off of page eleven to her. The book said no more than '12 cups' of flour. So five cups of bread flour is too much when the instruction booklet says 12? Hummph! and hogwash! And that the machine should not run for more than six minutes at a time. . .Six minutes? SIX MINUTES?

What if I had been making a really stiff dough like pasta? Oh, yeah, that's right. . .it wouldn't make semolina pasta dough at all when I tried it. . .that's right -- 2 1/2 cups of semolina would not mix and knead smoothly enough on a $300 machine to run through the pasta extruding attachment we purchased separately and it was an electric attachment, not the old hand-cranked one I have used for years.

The Oster Kitchen Center we had previously mixed 8 cups of flour for 3 loaves of bread or two pizza crusts at a time at least 3 days a week for nearly 20 years with no complaints from it or me (plus using the blender, ice cream freezer, food processor, shredder and meat grinder attachments daily) until I finally wore it out. . .not the motor wearing out, mind you. . .the connector that held the attachments to the motor was so worn down that it was unusable, but the motor fired up just fine. And, yes, it routinely made double batches of semolina pasta dough that I ran through my hand cranked Atlas pasta machine. And ground sausage for half an hour at a time. That's a bit more than the six minutes I am being told I can run this machine at a time.

The result? I am E-mailing and blogging my dissatisfaction in hopes that this spares anyone else from purchasing a piece of junk. Yeah, they are sending us a new machine, but we don't think we should not have had to put up a fight to get it plus they do not guarantee that it will be any better than the two we have had already. . .. Period.

Will I be able to make sausage? Pasta? Bread? Pizza crust? on the new machine or will it just take up space on my counter top? I am so disappointed for both my sake as a cook and Joe's because it was a gift from him that he worked long hours at his second job to purchase for me.

Please pass this along to anyone and everyone you know that is a serious cook or knows a serious cook. Kitchen Aid does not equal quality in my opinion. Such a shame.