Best toaster we have ever had! This product performs flawlessly year after year from toast to bagels to the kid's pop-ups. The only problem that ever happened was the handle on the slide mechanism came off. I put it back on with silicon and it has stayed.

Before purchasing this toaster, I read many reviews on it. Some good, some bad. I purchased the toaster a few months ago despite any bad reviews, and it has been working great!! No problems at all. Bread is toasted evenly and bagels come out great. I would recommend this product. It looks nice and fits well on the counter. No problems here!

Like others, I fell for the KitchenAid name, figuring it had to be a good toaster based on the manufacturer's reputation. Boy, was I wrong, and boy, am I mad, after all the money I paid for this frustrating appliance. First, the good points: it holds 4 slices of most bread, and the long slots can accommodate slices of homemade loaves that are wider than normal. That's about it. As far as actually toasting bread, forget it--this "toaster" can't do it. The bread comes out half-browned, or rather half underdone and half burnt. We use the highest setting and still have to put English muffins down twice to get any toast color. In short, I own a bread heating machine, but I'm still searching for a real toaster that consistently produces uniformly browned slices of bread, bagels, and English muffins. If we can put a man on the moon, why am I still searching for the Holy Grail (a toaster that toasts)?

When the old toaster quit my brother came up this one. "How much", I said. "$80+", he said. Me: "What happened to twenty dollar Proctor Silex toasters"? Him: "Never heard of a twenty dollar toaster".

Days pass, I think of toast, drop in two slices of Home Pride wheat bread. Seeing the control dial goes from 1 to 9, I set it about 3. Burnt toast. Starting over, I find that 2 works, but only if you turn the dial counterclockwise to 1 and then up to 2. But while 3 makes burnt toast, 2 makes extra light toast. Oddly, sometimes you can turn the thing a lot either way and the light stays on 2 (or whatever), while other times you barely touch it and it bumps up one or more settings. Unless you do it exactly the same way, you're gonna get something different than you think. So, the dial makes no sense, and the toaster doesn't make very good toast.

Now, the most important kind of toast, English Muffins.

Long ago you could get a perfect English Muffin at Ligget's Drugstore north of Times Square, near the Roxy theater. This was before all the "nooks and crannies" blather on the package - they just sliced them in half with a big knife and put them on a conveyor type commercial toaster, along with everyone else's toast. A few minutes later, your English Muffin appeared, perfectly done in the middle, perfectly brown on top, with a couple of small but tasty burnt edges here and there.

It's probably impossible to get the same results at home, but you live in hope... so I could sort of overlook the plain toast problem with this Kitchen Aid toaster if it made great or even good English Muffins. But it doesn't.

First, you must use 9, the highest setting, but that produces English Muffins with no color, that don't look toasted at all and taste like school paste. So to cook one you must use 9 and when that's done, push the handle down again and toast some more; but this is a complete guess - 30 seconds, a minute...? Once its done, you can't grab the muffin slices and there's no extra lift on the handle, so you use a fork, same as you did with the old twenty dollar Proctor Silex.

Waay too much money for waay too much trouble for not so good results.

Here at Amazon, I see the Proctor Silex is still around, now selling for $12.99

This could be a fluke toaster, but it doesn't toast evenly from one end to the other. I have had Kitchen Aid toasters before and loved them. But this one needs some help.