A bit late but a coffee-loving tea drinker here who's struggled to buy a water kettle for their mother and found it completely exasperating. Part of the proble

A bit late but a coffee-loving tea drinker here who's struggled to buy a water kettle for their mother and found it completely exasperating. Part of the problem too is fraud and its downstream effects on purchasing decisions. I haven't bought a new kettle in about 12 years. Ours at the time was about 70 USD and now costs 250. In that time I've noticed counterfeits of our kettle become a problem everywhere. A kettle is a simple thing. My wife's kettle she got for a tiny amount somewhere before it rusted out after years. The first kettle we recently purchased for my mom, a well respected brand, rusted profusely within two weeks. If you read reviews of kettles, they're filled with comments about them falling apart, rusting, the enamel chipping and the the steel rusting, and so forth and so on. I doubt the company making this recent kettle wanted this spec; it probably is being produced under spec fraudulently. What happens is, you buy an expensive kettle, and its a fraud, either because it's a knockoff, or because it's authentic but the actual production models are different from bidding prototypes. So now you're out the same as if you bought a cheap one. Is buying more expensive worth it? After awhile it becomes pervasive because it's everywhere. It's hard to separate signal from noise in purchasing. I completely agree about problems in the race to the cheapest, but sometimes I think even when the consumer is willing to pay a bit more for higher quality, if you can't discriminate anymore because of fraud it becomes rational to save your money. (FWIW, we returned the kettle and got an even more expensive one — we'll see how this one goes.)