by Nick Taylor 

The latest information from Cuisinart surprised us. They replaced our riveted blade quickly when its parent company, Conair, recalled the blades last December after some of them broke up and left shards of metal in the food. Not everybody had the same experience.

One ConsumerMojo viewer, Inara F.,  wrote to say she had filled out Cuisinart’s online form before Christmas to have two faulty blades replaced, but as of January 4 she hadn’t received them.  And, she added, “the customer service number is always busy.”

Now it turns out that Cuisinart isn’t as on top of things as we had thought.  Today we got an email thanking us for our patience and saying that our new blade “could be shipped any time between 2/6/17 and 2/20/17.”  We apologize, the message continued, for any inconvenience.

Cuisinart processors are a fixture in almost every kitchen we’ve been in. Ours would be hard to do without, and we’re not alone in that. And we grant that it’s not easy to replace 8 million blades for one of the country’s most popular kitchen appliances. 

As the Cuisinart email said, its “blades are fabricated using precise manufacturing processes, which . . . means they take some time to produce.” But they’re working as fast as they can “to meet the enormous demand resulting from this replacement program.”  

That’s fine. We tip our hat. But we hope we weren’t outliers when we got our new blade so quickly in December, and we hope Cuisinart sends somebody else our replacement blade, since we don’t need it and apparently a lot of other people do.