A tale of four toasters (and four toaster ovens)

When my wife's original toaster died in 2016, I convinced her to get a toaster oven. I had bought one in my early twenties and had it for about fifteen years. (For all I know, my ex-wife still has it.) Since I never had a microwave, it was my go-to appliance for heating small meals, plus it made great toast. If you can love an appliance, I loved that toaster oven.

She agreed and I did my research and bought one that was disappointing from the start. In particular, it didn't make good toast. Instead of pushing a button, you had to set a timer, and if you didn't get it exactly right (or watch it like a hawk) it burned the toast every time. That is, except when you forgot to put it in "toast" mode, in which case you came back to warm bread.

My research also indicated the heating element tended to blow after a couple of years, so I paid $10 for the "extended warranty," which is something I never do. Two years later, the heating element blew, so I took the whole thing back and they gave me a new one! A year later, the heating element on that one blew, so I took it back but the model had been discontinued so they refunded me the purchase price! It was like I'd rented a toaster oven for three years for $10.

Now at that point I should have listened to my family and bought a toaster, but instead I listened to the salesman who sold me a "better" toaster oven. I got that home to find it took up the entire countertop, so it immediately went back and I came home with a much smaller one. This one had the same issue as the first one -- burnt toast -- so my wife went to Kmart, picked up a $9 toaster, and the kids were ecstatic. They'd been without a decent toaster for a quarter of their lifetime! Bread consumption shot way up.

Of course a $9 toaster is not going to last, and within a year it went supernova -- literally, when you turned it on, it lit up like the sun. (We unplugged it before we saw what happened next.) We took it back to Kmart and, to their credit, they replaced it without question. A month later, the lever on that one stopped working, so we were going to take it back but then Covid-19 lockdown happened. When the lockdown was lifted, our car died and was in the shop for nearly a month. When we finally got the car back, we took the toaster back to Kmart and were told the warranty had expired two weeks earlier*.

It was a moot point, anyway, as they were out of $9 toasters and I refused to pay more. So we went back to the toaster oven, and bread consumption went way down. A couple of months later, they were back in stock and we bought a new one. Two weeks later, it looked like this:

Now, you might be wondering what happened to cause the plastic to literally melt off the top and sides. Was it a fault? Did the kids stick a knife in it while it was turned on? No. My wife decided that, rather than use the toaster oven to heat up a tortilla (which it's really good at!) she would rip the tortilla in half, stick it in the toaster briefly and remove it when it was warm. Of course she got distracted and left the kitchen for a moment; the tortilla halves flopped over and by the time the toast cycle had finished, they were on fire. Fortunately my wife returned and caught it before anything else happened.

Do I tell this story to embarrass my wife? Yes. Did I take the toaster back to Kmart, tell them the toaster caught fire spontaneously and demand a full refund? No, but I did think about it. (My father would have done it.) I did go and buy a new $9 toaster, bringing the total I've spent on toasting appliances over the past five years to $122 (plus about $1,800 on bread).

* Some of the details have been changed to make a better story.