Two nights ago I decided to make some dip for the super bowl. I got the recipe from a woman who I worked with in college,
and while it is easily the unhealthiest concoction imaginable I was pining
hard to eat it. The dish requires several bricks of Velveeta cheese, some Bob Evans
Italian Sausage, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a jar of salsa. After
browning the sausage the ingredients are put into a Crockpot as the onlookers
are forced to wait as the room fills with the smell of artificial goodness.
The
dip turned out to be as good as I remember it, but some simple science caused
the clean up to be a bit more difficult than I could’ve imagined. Taking a
Crockpot from a cold plug and heating it up too quickly led to a bottoming out
of the removable pot. It literally cracked in a perfectly symmetrical circle
where the bottom of the pot was hung an inch above the heat source. This caused
a sticky gooey mess that sealed the broken bottom in a burnt cheesy mixture
that resembled the aftermath of a bout of food poisoning than a dip that was
just eaten.
My
immediate reaction was to throw it away, but then I thought how ridiculous that
sounded. Why in the world would I throw away a Crockpot just because a
replaceable part broke? Surely I would be able to fix it with minimal effort? I
was actually upset that my thought process immediately went towards
replacement, a more expensive but easier option, than trying to use a little
ingenuity to fix it. After all, those types of problems happened every day in
Paraguay.
Then I started to realize that maybe my initial reaction was the only option. I was disturbed at the thought that maybe trying to figure out the name of the part of the specific brand and model of the Crockpot, finding a place that sold the part in a retail store or online, paying for it and waiting for the order to be filled would probably cost more than buying a new one. I reluctantly threw it away, and am not proud to say that the action bothered me all day.
Yesterday, my mom and I went to replace it. I agreed to pay for it because I broke it and
thought that the cost would have to be higher then when we bought the original.
We went to a department store, and started to browse around. I was shocked by
how many options existed. Some had full digital monitoring system that looked
more like a satellite than a kitchen appliance. Others were so technologically
complicated that the cost tripled the amount that my mom had bought the
original for. After spending about 10-minutes looking through the options an
employee offered to help us find one using their in-store computer registry. To
my absolute amazement we found the exact same Crockpot, with an additional
smaller Crockpot that could be shipped to our house in 5 days for $10 less than
the one my mother had purchased several years earlier!
I
couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking how is this possible? How often do people
buy Crockpots that justifies such a low price? Then I thought, well, I broke
one just because of a sudden 25-degree change in temperature, so this has to
happen all the time. The overall cost of the basic model is still low enough
where the is no room to even carry replacement parts for the thing even though
Crockpot technology hasn’t really changed at all since they were invented in
the 1970s. In fact, as we were leaving my mom said that my grandmother has two
that she has had for decades, and that when I move to my own place that I could
have one of them.
I’m
convinced that all the fancy Crockpots I saw for crazy amounts of money with
all sorts of digital gadgets on them probably aren’t as reliable as the
original models that only had an on and off switch. Despite all the
technological marvels that have occurred since the Crockpot was originally
invented the models seem to be designed to fail within a 5-year period even the
ones with all the bells and whistles. A Crockpot is a nice thing to have, and
my family uses them all the time. What I cannot get over is how something that
is so technically simple can be redesigned to look nicer, with improved
materials, and work worse 40 years after its invention. I just wish I could of
found a way to fix it for the same small effort it took to get a new one.
