Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Note that almost EVERY SINGLE positive review was written in exchange for compensation. That explains how an item with such glorious reviews would break on the second use. Also note that this item has only be available for a few months and yet there are already 150 reviews. Look at any other item on Amazon and you will see that this situation is virtually unprecedented. Also note that there is no way to gauge durability. However, since the situation with PAID positive reviewers (compensated by free or greatly reduced pricing) skews the accuracy of the reviews as well as the overall average rating, the question is, how can a consumer make a sound decision? TO get a rmore realistic representation of this product, note that this exact same item is sold under several names. Also note that the average rating is pretty much the same across the board, and it isn't as glorious as all the compensated reviewers make it out to be. Note the fact that I would have the audacity to point out the factual situation with an extremely high percentage of positive reviewers being compensated to compose 4 and 5 star ratings will surely result in many readers marking my review as unhelpful, even though it is detailed and pretty thorough, and even though I was not PAID to say something nice. The fact of the matter is, I REALLY wanted this to be as good as all the hype. And if one of the blades hadn't bent and fallen out during the second use, I would still be using this item today. The reasons that I say that are many. But mainly because it is a very functional and useful item which has the potential to save lots of time. That is IF it hadn't broken so quickly. There were many things I liked before the untimely demise of this kitchen tool. It cuts sizes/shapes according to which blade you use. I love the idea of being able to slice and dice fruits and vegetables with ease. Especially if you are looking for a very fine dice. Much quicker than it can be done by hand, even when considering clean up time. Unfortunately as I stated, on the second use, blades broke while chopping a quarter of a regular size onion. I do find this easy to clean with the included fork tool. And I did try it out with several types of did, including soft foods that are likely to get caught in the grid. Blackberries and a few other items foods not push through the blades well, so they clogged up the grid. Cleaning the grid was easy. However, cleaning the blade is a little more difficult. The easiest way to clean the blade itself is to always chop the softest items first and the firmest ones last. For instance with a fruit salad let the last item be a couple slices of apple. Even the blade may be full of various soft foods, as soon as you pop an apple slice through, everything else goes down, making clean up a breeze. It's important to clean it right away so that food doesn't dry in the pusher grid or blades. Using just the fork tool (included) and a kitchen faucet sprayer, the item is all but clean, even when the volume of food smooshed into the pusher grid is high. Now to compare with other similar products: I've had the vidalia chopper and it is more durable. Both function well and have approximately the same size blades. A medium size onion will fit on the blade of either the vidalia chopper or this one without any problem. The vidalia chopper got a great deal of use and has held up well. I like that this chopper has a slicing blade, so I decided to try it out. Unfortunately I have had it less than a full day and already have a broken blade. Thumbs down. Also be aware that almost all of the reviews shown here are by people who received compensation in the form free product or discounted product in exchange for positive reviews. In addition notice that the oldest review is only a couple months old at most which leads me to believe this item has not been around long enough to see it's longevity where durability is concerned. I really wish this had held up because the slicer blade worked well on everything I used it on (only softer items such as strawberries, mushrooms, etc.). I also like that the blades store inside of the case. If it were durable, the slicing blade and the ability to store blades inside of the unit would give it the edge over the vidalia onion choppor. I also own the nicer dicer plus fusion (newest model) and it has no durability issues thus far, with heavy use for extra large batches of salsa as well as other fruit and vegetable salads. However, the surface area of the tiny grid blade (about 1/4" squares) is much smaller than the surface area of the standard dicing blade that comes with nicer dicer fusion. It is also smaller than the surface area of the mini-size dice blade on the vegetable's chef or vidalia onion chopper. The mini dice blade is the one I use the most, so I found myself using the vidalia onion chopper for that. The Nicer Dicer Fusion also has a lot more pieces to clean, so I tend to use it when I have very large jobs to do. surface area of its standard dicing blade(1/2" squares) is double that of the of the dicing blade surface area on the vegetable's chef or the vidalia chopper. Gladly, Amazon is great in handling returns, so back this goes and I'll go back to using a knife for slicing and back to the vidalia chopper for most jobs.