Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I just really wanted to believe in a myth: that KitchenAid is all about sensible, durable, dependable appliances. Or that KitchenAid is serious about its "hassle-free" policy. Because "hassle-full" seems to describe my experience with the brand much more accurately. I originally purchased a 300-Watt tilt-head mixer, but after about three minutes mixing a small batch of bread dough for the very first time, its dough hook snapped broken. Customer service wasn't very good, so a few months and several complaints later, I received this larger unit as a replacement. Unfortunately, this supposedly sturdier unit hasn't held its own either. The dough hook is still in one piece, but the mixer itself (the motor) has broken down three times already, despite my best care. I never mix for more than five or six minutes at a time, and only use speed 1 to mix bread dough. Moreover, I never exceed the maximum load of approximately 14 cups; in fact, all the bread recipes I make total no more than about 8 cups of wet mixture -- less than 12 cups of ingredients, wet and dry. (My recipes come from either The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart, or Bread - A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes, by Jeffrey Hamelman, both well-known books with very carefully tested recipes.) The first time I took the mixer to the repair centre, it took them a month to return it to me. The second time, it was returned after 10 days, but worked for all of 40 seconds before breaking down again. And the third time I only got it back after 41 days. Mind you, those repairs were all covered by the warranty, performed at an authorized repair centre. I got a six-month warranty extension, but imagine what it'll be like when the warranty has expired... So, just to recapitulate, in one year I was unable to use the mixer for more than two months, time during which I had to put up with a lot of hassle in what seemed to be a futile attempt to get it properly fixed -- to say nothing of my disappointment with the fact that a KitchenAid mixer has broken down three times already with small batches of bread dough during its first year of use.