Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I received the 5 qt bowl lift stand mixer for a Christmas gift. It's performance was pathetic from day one but we managed to limp along for six months before it quit altogether. It's elliptical orbit was supposed to make better contact with the food it was mixing, but instead it made contact with the bowl, scratching it and completely throwing the bowl off it's pins. You could not begin to hold the bowl on to the machine even with both hands! It would heat up, give off the 'hot electrical' smell and quit. When we called Kitchen Aide, their *first* response was that it was 'operator error.' Sorry folks, but after being a professional cook, I am smart enough to snap a bowl in place over two pins and a button spring-snap at the back. It was insulting on top of having to cope with a mixer that did not live up to even the least of my expectations. We called them and they sent a replacement. It worked two weeks, got hot and quit in the middle of mixing 5 cups of bread flour. And the same little snippy customer dis-service agent *argued* that a 5-quart mixer should not have to handle that load. For thirty minutes she tried to force us to believe that it was user error. She then had the audacity to suggest we make *half a pizza*, wait half an hour and make the other half of the pizza. What planet does she live on? A $300 machine can't make a single crust pizza? Does that mean I make a half of a loaf of bread at a time, too? That machine should make half a dozen loaves of bread every day of the week for years for that kind of money. We asked to speak to a supervisor and read the instructions right off of page eleven to her. The book said no more than '12 cups' of flour. So five cups of bread flour is too much when the instruction booklet says 12? Hummph! and hogwash! And they suggested that the machine should not run for more than six minutes at a time. . .Six minutes? SIX MINUTES? What if I had been making a really stiff dough like pasta? Oh, yeah, that's right. . .it wouldn't make semolina pasta dough at all when I tried it. . .that's right 2 1/2 cups of semolina would not mix and knead on a $300 machine enough to run through the pasta extruding attachment we purchased separately. How about trying to grind sausage in six minutes? That isn't going to happen in this life time either. Save your money and skip the attachments even if you break down and buy the mixer. The Oster Kitchen Center we had mixed 8 cups of flour for 3 loaves of bread at a time at least 3 days a week for nearly 20 years with no complaints from it or me (plus using the blender, ice cream, food processor, shredder and grinder attachments) until I finally wore it out. . .not the motor, mind you. . .the connector that held the attachments to the motor was so worn down that it was unusable, but the motor fired up just fine. And, yes, it routinely made double batches of semolina pasta dough that I ran through my hand cranked Atlas pasta machine. Yeah, they are sending us a new machine, but we don't think we should have had to go through this plus they do not guarantee that it will be any better than the two we have had already. And we certainly should not have to had to argue for half an hour that a five quart machine can't handle five cups of King Arthur bread flour.