Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update 12/2018:. After a truly miserable couple years of fighting with this Vitamix to perform the simplest tasks outside of smoothie making, my husband bought us another blender for Christmas and we gave away our Vitamix for free. So happy! And funny thing is the new blender does the stuff we expected of the Vitamix (but wouldn't) just fine with no struggle. Grew up with a Vitamix (which worked pretty well back then), bought my own Vitamix (terrible waste of $$), and can't recommend Vitamix ever to anyone because it just under performs all the time unless you are making very basic smoothies with a lot of liquid. Smooth smoothies aren't so important to me that I would pay $450 for a machine just to make the smoothest smoothies. -------- I have almost every kitchen appliance under the sun. I'm not kidding. My husband and I pride ourselves on our food prep and preservation skill and pioneering it out (well, like pioneers with electronics). Food processor small and large, instant pot, crock pot, pressure canner, mandolin, 9 tray food dehydrator, immersion blender, nutribullet, ninja fit, berkey gravity water system, vacuum sealer, professional grade kitchen aid stand mixer, cast iron waffle irons, etc......and a vitamix. When our hearty but cheap Black and Decker blender broke, I absolutely insisted we had to have a vitamix to replace it. After all, I made nuts milks from scratch, and nut butters, and pesto sauce and massive green smoothies. I needed top of the line power! At nearly $400 (thought I think it was a few dollars off at costco where I bought it). I NEEDED a vitamix....it was the most powerful of blenders, my family had one of the original vitamix and used it for like 20 years. So I got it. A vitamix is like the blender version of the Emperor has no clothes story. Everyone raves about it, but it seems the only thing they dare demo in it (think costco demonstrations, videos online) are 4 gallons of water to 6 spinach leaves and half a soft banana. Then you find out that people raving about it are using it to make smoothies in the morning or soup which is 97 percent liquids. It's the best kept secret that a vitamix basically can blend almost nothing. I'll give you some real life scenarios (since it is unlikely you will ever come across an honest in person demo in a store). Use the instruction book and make nut butter. It cannot grind the nuts, unless you relentlessly jab and poke and drive individual nuts into the pathetic blade structure, until your arms ache. The screaming and protesting of the machine, the BURNING SMELL, the seizing of the blades unable to cope with coming in contact with something firmer than a ripe strawberry, spinning only the bottom third of the mixture into nut butter where the oil has gotten so hot that it literally tastes like burned plastic, yet the mixture above remain unprocessed since it could not be pulled into the blades. You can't tamp the nut mixture any closer to the blades because we aren't working with 3/4 of a blend container of nuts, but a reasonable amount. Ok, so you stop trying to make nut butters, frustrated and exhausted. I'm not even going to mention how you get the nut butter out of the container that has fixed blades at the bottom and the nut butter has become one with the blade structure. Ah, that's right, they cheerfully say to just blend up soap water in there to clean it up! Yes! It works.....if you like leaving the only usable third of your blended item in the container and washing it down the drain along with the sudsy wash water. You then say, my basil plants are prolific and I want to make loads of pesto sauce. They even have a pesto sauce recipe in the vitamix recipe book, with exact order of what you need to put in the container (because even they know you dare not put things out of order lest the useless blades not be able to even spin one rotation). Pick bushels of basil leaves and set out supplies, cheerful. You use the recipe to a T. Following their blend instructions, the blades paddle the already wilting from the warmth of your hands basil leaves, pushing them around, as you keep increasing speed it starts pretending to do a little work. You become a little worried because you are almost a setting 7 and that's only supposed to go for what, 30 seconds after that?? Some leaves are being sucked down and pulverized. Some are, then the telltale, one third blend nonsense. It starts blending the few things it has sucked in into a silky smooth paste and the rest of your basil stay there, some loosely chopped. You whip out your damper, which you suddenly realize the machine cannot operate at all without. You must have the damper. You must always poke and prod and urge it along. You start prodding leaves, you damp down one side, the other side stays where it is because it has yet to be damped. You go around and around the edges. The machine screams in protest like you are trying to drive shims of wood into its blades (remember we are using basil leaves here not wood). Finally all had made it to the blades. Then there is the hesitating, like "can I blend this? I think I can!" and uncertainly chugs along, batch after batch after batch of pesto sauce. Using a narrow blade spatula trying to get the pesto out of the container into storage ones. My, I hate this vitamix, I start to exclaim regularly. I make nut milk. It works! Hint, some shredded coconut plus 6 cups of water blends great (because it is basically all water). It blends nice and smooth. It even warms it. Brazil nut milk. Same thing. (Remember, you are adding tons and tons of water in these cases). Black bean soup (hint, mostly broth and very soft cooked beans) is fine. Basically anything that is thicker than pure drinkable liquid is impossible to blend. Last example, pressure cooked butternut squash. You can mash it by hand with a fork with ease. But it is luxurious to make a squash puree. You add cups and cups of cooking liquid (I like squash puree that is the consistency of on the thinner side yogurt). Soft, hot, plenty of liquids, some butter. Turn it on slowly. Hoping. You always hope with the vitamix and almost always are disappointed. Maybe this time? No, not now either. It makes this eager blending sounds and as you turn it up faster and faster, it starts to bog down like, irregularly jerking chunks towards the center. It starts getting worse, if you back off, it makes not difference because it becomes overwhelmed and startled there is actually a mixture inside the blender touching its blades. You proceed, you prod madly with damper, then it reaches its max potential and give up with a rising pitch scream and seizes, and the top stops moving while the blades madly concentrate on turning the bottom third of the squash puree into the finest smoothest molten lava, leaving the top part chunky and unprocessed. You jab and stir with the damper. You turn the blender off. You shake it, and there is a massive blurp plopping sound as a bunch of air is belched out from Somewhere (it can't even blend air?), and breaks the surface. You replace the container and start it out. Except for the sound rising in pitch, you really see no movement or action. You add even more liquid risking turning into soup you have to drink out of a mug. It likes more liquids and as you drizzle and cajole it slowly agrees to blend the rest of the puree, but tells you its annoyance by grinding, jerking its feet to one side like it is straining trying to pulverize nuts and bolts, and you may even be treated to a burning smell. Your smooth squash is ready to serve! This goes for pancake batter as well. If you ask my husband, he would tell you how many times I tell him how much I hate my vitamix. He says I should just get rid of it and get something else. Maybe a Ninja? I don't know. All I know is that I am dreadfully disappointed, out a lot of money, and don't have a trusty blender by my side. I dread using it. It never works except to make green smoothies and pure liquids. Every time I pass a vitamix demonstration in costco with the sales rep showing eager faced customers how to make an all milk, three berry, and six leaf smoothie, it takes all my will power to take another aisle quickly before I pull my cart up and tell everyone to please, save their money or shout a challenge to the rep to show us the real limits of the machine. I want you to make nut butter right now with these almonds and we want to see you sweat, right here on the demo platform. This is almost half of a THOUSAND DOLLARS, folks! I would think you could 1) clean a machine like this better than just the lame, blend soap and water method. How do I get my STUFF OUT?? and 2) use the machine to at minimum make the recipes their recipe book promotes and 3) use the machine to be like a professional grade tool in your kitchen and not a useless, screaming, protesting, damper requiring, poor performing mess. Seriously, it has way less spunk than our what $40 Black and Decker. The Black and Decker couldn't get as fine a smooth texture on liquids or smoothies, but it dragged everything into its blades cheerfully and made an awfully good $40 attempt at getting the mixture as smooth as possible. I was making nut milk fine in it for example. What a disgrace Vitamix has become. And please don't tell me how shocked at the performance of mine because this isn't the vitamix way. This isn't a dud. This is just a poorly designed WAYYYYY too expensive blender worth about say $35.