Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Yes, it's just a pot, and we in the West are incredibly fortunate compared to other regions and eras. But this trend in deceptive marketing, product management and manufacturing methodologies for short-term Wall Street profits often come at the expense of a company's and industry's long term health. In myriad ways the lowering of quality standards in general is not just bad for the consumer, but ultimately destructive to society itself. Just one of those ways is when a single parent company owns the lion's share of competing manufacturers in an entire product segment. Rampant industry consolidation is not just bad for products and consumers, but competition in general, and competition is the backbone of free market capitalism. Unfortunately, what I'm getting at goes even deeper than that, but I digress so on to the review . . . The first pot we received was warped so the lid wouldn't fit, and we had to submit for a replacement. Sending Amazon returns is a pain because the last two times we opted for carrier pickup, the return just sat in the lobby of our building collecting dust. Since we don't have a car it's difficult where we live to send it via other means. So we end up eating the price of the item when mailing it back is more trouble than it's worth. In this case, at a 100 bucks for a medium-sized (but heavy) pot, we have no choice but to take the trouble to ship it back. Our new Calphalon pot is virtually identical to the one it replaced (that has grooves scratched in it by overzealous stainless steel whisking), yet the nonstick coating in the new pot is far inferior to that of the old pot. It's the same exact model from their "Contemporary" line, looks virtually identical from top to bottom and handle to lid, but Calphalon has very obviously cut corners on the updated version. The coating is already sloughing off (into our food). You can even tell at a glance, just by placing the two nonstick surfaces side-by-side that they're different – the new pot's nonstick surface literally LOOKS cheaper! This nonstick surface was also leached far more chemicals than our old pot. Giving it a good scrub was not nearly enough, which we found out after attempting to eat the first bowl of oatmeal we christened the pot with. It tasted just as much like chemical nonstick coating as it did oatmeal, the leaching was so intense. So we had to boil the pot in soapy water. Whether or not this is standard procedure for nonstick, all we know is that we have never before boiled a pot in dishwashing liquid, and yet have never as a result tasted nonstick chemicals after cooking in a new set of pots and pans. As for cleaning it, for many foods (like sticky hot breakfast cereals) we still find ourselves using the old pot instead, even though much of the nonstick coating is worn. And whenever we use the new pot we now spray it with Pam, just as we do with our stainless steel pots – something we never had to do with the old pot. As customers we now have to take with a grain of salt reviews posted a mere year or two previously because the product reviewed is more and more likely to have changed in the interim. It is interesting to have had a frame of reference with this purchase, a convenient point of comparison with an identical model, yet I believe the drop in quality is significant enough that we would've noticed anyway. Were we new customers, we otherwise might not have known any better because it is still easier to clean than stainless steel. So for the price we paid and trouble we took, the outcome of this purchase has brought us back to square one, continuing to take up time, money, and energy as we now look to replace the pot that failed to replace the pot. It's such a shame because we have owned nothing but Calphalon for many years (both stainless steel and nonstick) and this experience now has us looking elsewhere. Calphalon has likely determined that enough customers won't notice the incremental changes to what many customers won't know used to be a significantly better product. For most big businesses this drop in product quality is worth the added profit weighed against the potential hit to their reputation. But it's not worth it to us. Just like a business has to do what a business has to do, a customer has to do what a customer has to do. In our case it's look elsewhere for a pot that has more durable and easier to clean coating. The last place we will look is at Calphalon's line of premium nonstick models – which I would venture to guess have similar quality nonstick surfaces to the pot we haplessly attempted to replace. Falling prey to an up-sell from their already overpriced Contemporary line would just add insult to injury, and needlessly reward this prevalent trend of systematically sneaking in incremental hits to product quality. Companies have gotten product deterioration down to a science. Fine, make certain products lines more affordable. It's to be expected with commoditized product categories. But they've taken it way too far. Companies will wait until the reviews are pumped up on a product, and then bank on that as they rig production lines to alter the product's standards with cheaper parts, manufacturing methods, and quality control. There are ENTIRE product categories that have gotten so bad that even if one opts for the best reviewed, most expensive humidifier, coffee grinder, bathroom scale, microwave, treadmill, thermal underwear, pair of socks, etc. – the drop in standards to fit and finish, durability and reliability, utility and useability is immediately apparent to older consumers who have purchased multiple of a product category over the years.