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Crummy Japanese dish dryer still gets five-star reviews on Amazon for unexpected reason

Master Blaster Aug 16, 2017
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Many are calling this a “high-performance” product even though it’s apparently terrible at drying dishes.

As many online shoppers will tell you, Amazon is a great place to purchase a mystery box of imperfect seafood or giant robot Online. But it doesn’t get enough credit as the center of education that it sometimes is. You can learn a lot about different walks of life that you might not otherwise encounter day-to-day.

Take the Yamazen Dish Dryer YD-180, which is available on Amazon Japan for 6,580 yen (US$60). Prior to this I’ve never even heard of a “dish dryer,” seeing as things like a towel or…nothing tends to do the job just fine.

But I suppose for those who need their dishes dried fast, yet without touching them to cloth like some savage, this product exists. Let’s see what some previous purchasers had to say about it in the Amazon reviews.

“This is clearly ineffective at drying dishes.”
“It didn’t dry my dishes at all, so I bought a different one.”
“It was worse at drying dishes than I expected.”

So it would seem that the questionable existence of the dish dryer is made even more questionable by the fact that it can’t even seem to fulfill its sole purpose.

And yet, despite these comments, the Yamazen Dish Dryer YD-180 has received very high star ratings with 102 out of 175 Amazon users giving it the full five stars. Your first instinct might be that some sneaky Yamazen employees or hired review mercs were artificially inflating the product’s reviews, but reading a little more shows us what’s really going on.

“I bought it as a drying booth for my models.”
“It’s great to dry the paint on my plastic models.”
“This thing is ideal for models.”
“It’s a high-performance paint dryer.”
“This is a rare product that can dry with natural air at 40 degrees.”
“This is in the same class as genuine drying booths.”
“With this I could finish a couple coats in three days which would normally take a week.”

Just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so to is one man’s dish dryer another man’s plastic model drying booth. According to these Amazon users, the key point of the Yamazen Dish Dryer is that it works like a convection oven. It draws in air from the outside and heats it up, then it exhausts to allow fresh air to come in. This system apparently sucks at drying dishes, but reportedly works great for paint.

A quick glance at Amazon.com shows that an actual drying booth sells for around $400, making the Yamazen Dish Dryer a steal at less than a quarter of the price.

Now, for all you model enthusiasts reading this, we cannot actually endorse this dish dryer as a paint drying booth, because it isn’t designed for that purpose and may lead to unforeseen risks. But hopefully someone from Yamazen is checking their Amazon reviews and will spend the little R&D needed to rebrand their product into something much more lucrative.

Source: Amazon
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