Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This little pepper mill is small but very cute. When you open it up it comes with a little instruction card on how to prepare the grinder before you use it. They recommend running some uncooked rice through to "get rid of any metal shards" that might be on the grinder. I did that and the grinder moved through the rice pretty impressively. Obviously if this step is to get rid of metal shards on the grinder, you don't want to eat them so I took the base off (which is only held on by friction), dumped the ground rice, and rinsed the bottom base with a little warm water. That's when I noticed something.. the base and the grinder (I bought the copper one) are actually coated or plated with the color. The coating on the rim of the base was peeling off and metal was flaking from the base into where the ground pepper would go. See the picture for what I'm talking about. As I'm not about to eat ground metal shavings while I spice my food I decided to return this, only to learn that Amazon will not allow returns of this item. I called their customer service and they refunded my money thankfully, but there was no way to facilitate that online. Anyways, the grinder itself worked pretty good and looked nice but the build quality seems to be along the lines of you get what you pay for. Might be worth the gamble for someone?