What is it with kitchen appliance manufacters? I would have thought that buying a new cooker would be easy enough; instead everywhere I went online had a vast database of what seemed like thousands of models and dozens of brands. Dropping into a real store (Powerhouse) yesterday to have a closer look explained why a little bit.
Firstly, these dozens of brands are actually only a fraction of that number. Side-by-side on display were cookers from different manufaturers, at different prices, which on closer inspection are distinguishable only by the brand name, because they are absolutely identical in other respects. In fact:
Zanussi = Parkinson Cowan Indesit = Creda/Hotpoint Stoves = Belling
Stoves cookers on the whole seemed to be pretentious and socially aspiring, while still decked out in cheap knobs and badly-finished edges. Belling at least didn't seem to pretend to be anything that it wasn't. A Zanussi cooker next to the same model with a Parkinson Cowan badge had a price sticker £150 higher. An Indesit badge seems to be add another £50 or so to the price of a Hotpoint cooker.
The salesman (a rather good-looking, languid young middle-class Indian who clearly gave the impression of being more at home amongst the wide-screen TVS and DVD-players) went through some amusing contortions trying to explain all this, but in the end had no answer for it.
It seemed to us that above £350 or so all the effort in a cooker goes into dressing it up, by putting uglier knobs on it, or hideous grey pain so that a blind person might briefly think "Mmm, stainless steel". It's not until the £850 mark that you actually notice much difference in quality.
In the end we gave up trying to understand and found a Smeg cooker at an excellent price in another store on the way home. Unfortunately, on returning home I found that we don't actually have a 30kW circuit in the house, so no electric ovens for us.
Daniele