Complaint Rating:

Is your stylish new Kitchenaid appliance falling apart in your hands? Need a new part, since the warranty has cleverly been designed to expire a few days before the part does?

Let’s take a look at the first page that appears when you go to whirlpoolparts.com which you can conveniently access after spending 45 minutes on hold with customer service, since the Kitchenaid website has no link.

http://www.whirlpoolparts.ca/terms_of_sale.php

In a nutshell, you’re greeted by a page telling you that you must pay in advance for the part and a) expect it never to arrive, b) if it does arrive, expect it to be broken c) expect to pay unknown shipping and handling and customs charges, and don’t expect them to be cheap considering the size of the part you probably need.

What kinds of parts might you want? How about the glass from your oven window? I broke mine accidentally, when I reacted in horror to finding my entire oven coated in a thick, permanent layer of baked on grease, after running the very first self-clean cycle. Self-clean, it turns out, doesn’t work at all on my particular oven. I reached in with a damp cloth to see whether the grease would come off, and water from the cloth dripped on to the door, causing it to shatter.

I understand that it was my fault (although it never would have happened if the self-clean cycle had worked), but Kitchenaid won’t let you order a new piece of glass – you have to order an entire OVEN DOOR!!! Instead I wound up installing a piece of glass from a scrap heap ready oven that I found at a used appliance store into my 13 month old oven.

The next thing to go was the convection fan. When I complained that it had stopped working after very little use, the staff person I reached at the Kitchenaid service line chided me for not buying the retailer's extended warrantee. Ah, so the shoddy workmanship has been offloaded on to retailers to deal with at huge cost to consumers.

Now I need a new produce door for my Kitchenaid refrigerator, the cheap plastic, handle having snapped in half. I won’t bore you with the details of endless holding, being transferred around, and non-productive conversations with customer service staff (which involved much erroneous information) that took up most of my morning. I think the website I quoted above speaks for itself.

I guess I’m just going to have to live with the duct-tape on the produce drawer, until enough parts expire to justify buying a new fridge from a different company. I only wish I could find something resembling the hideous, apricot oven and fridge I lived with for years in an old 40’s apartment. They looked terrible, but they sure worked.