Panasonic Breadmakers

I think I've blogged in praise of the Panasonic breadmaker in the past.  It's a brilliant piece of kit and we use ours almost daily.  In this case it's Panasonic we should thank for our daily bread.

But, our first Panasonic broke after about 18 months.  I think it was a mechanical failure.  So, because we are so dependent on our breadmaker I hot-footed it to Currys and bought another.  This time I paid for a "Care plan" which would last three years and provide a replacement should we experience another failure.

Today, exactly to the day, two years after I bought that second breadmaker it failed.  We tried three loaves and all were rubbish.  I couldn't remember the details of the Curry's Care plan so I phoned.  The nice customer sewrvice representative at the other end gave me a reference number and told me it expired on the 8th of January 2016.

We took the broken breadmaker which had cost £119.99 into the store and came away with the latest model which was on sale for £134.99.

I never buy product insurance but because we'd experienced one failure I thought I'd take the risk and this time it paid off.  As it's worked once for me I asked if I could do the same for this new breadmaker.  So I have paid another £30 to be covered for the next three years and, yes, I feel that Panasonic should probably design something that's a bit more robust, but I'm guessing that in two years time I'll be getting another upgrade because the current model will fail.

The unexpected bonus was that I will be getting a refund on the remaining year of unused Care Plan on the broken product.  I didn't expect that.