It might be the most loved appliance in the world, or at least in Australia, but that hasn’t stopped the bad news continuing for Thermomix. The home cooker, which retails for around $1,900, was today ‘awarded’ the industry’s lowest honour, a Choice Shonky Award.
The Shonkys are an annual ironic gong given to consumer products and services that don’t meet Choice’s admittedly high standards, and are given to those suppliers that treat users with a “shoddy experience”.
It’s been a tough few weeks for Thermomix and this Shonky comes on the back of a consumer backlash for launching a new model without significant warning and initiating a product recall on its TM31 machine due to a risk of scalding the user (we can’t stress enough, however, that this recall is one that does not require the product to be returned to the manufacturer).
It was for the aforementioned lack of advanced notice on the release of the new TM5 machine that ‘won’ Thermomix its Shonky, as Choice explains:
The TM5, which in Australia costs just $50 more than its predecessor, was released on 6 September 2014 with no prior warning, and some new owners took delivery of their full-price TM31s as late as a day or two before. Consumers told us they asked about the rumoured new model when they were buying their TM31s, and were assured there was no upgrade on the horizon. And those who bought a TM31 with hopes of a high resale value may well be sorely disappointed – loyal Thermo fans lost hundreds of dollars off the value of their TM31s overnight.
An Appliance Retailer investigation into this episode revealed that Thermomix consultants didn’t advise customers, many of them family and friends, of the new model, primarily because of a global release strategy – Thermomix is owned by Vorwerk, a German company – that demanded a certain level of secrecy.
In its explanation of this Shonky, Choice did note that the local supplier has attempted to make amends to any disappointed customers:
Thermomix Australia did eventually offer various sweeteners to those who had bought their TM31 after 1 July 2014. But for many consumers, it’s a case of too little too late. And if you thought things couldn’t get any worse, the TM31s were the subject of an ACCC recall due to a fault that could make affected machines splash out hot liquid.
Despite this adverse publicity, the ever-punctilious Choice backs up a point that Appliance Retailer has also made: it is virtually impossible to find a Thermomix user with a bad word to say about the product itself.
Meanwhile, Choice has levelled a Shonky at Amazon for its intriguing battery claims on one of its Kindle models:
The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite also received a Shonky Award for some creative accounting meant to convince consumers that one charge of the e-reader would provide eight weeks of battery life. Buried in the fine print was the fact that the Kindle’s claims were based on thirty minutes of use per day, meaning the actual battery life is 28 hours, far from the eight weeks promised.