First appeared in NewsBreak
By Aron Solomon
This morning we all learned that two million Cosori brand air fryers were immediately being recalled because they can cause serious burns and property damage.
CBS Newswatch reported that over 200 Cosori air fryers were reported catching fire, burning, melting, overheating and smoking.
If two million air fryers sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. But the numbers are this high because Cosori is a brand that simultaneously took advantage of two compelling points of intersection in the consumer world.
The first is our collective lust for air fryers, fueled by the pandemic. If you are like me and bought your air fryer right after the pandemic, rest assured that we aren’t even close to alone. There were well over 30 million air fryers sold since the pandemic, a truly astronomical figure for an appliance that, for almost everyone who owns one, is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have (even if it feels like it is).
The second key factor is Amazon. Just as Amazon drove our ability to instantly acquire HEPA filters and the like during the dawn of the pandemic, it literally brought us air fryers in droves.
As Attorney Krenar Camili points out, that’s part of the problem here:
“Manufacturers rushed this appliance to market to meet completely unforeseen demand. Given the circumstances, today’s massive recall shouldn’t be a huge surprise.”
As I was one of the people impacted by the recall, I went through the process in real-time very early this morning and can report that it’s not ideal.
First, you’ll need to go to their recall website, pick your country, and start to input model numbers, once you find them.
Once that’s done, you need to take pictures of the bottom, front, and back of your Cosori air fryer. All of this needs to be uploaded. Even at the crack of dawn today, the site wasn’t fast.
You then need to enter all of your contact and shipping information. If you have the (better IMHO) rotary model, you’re out of luck if you want the same one – you’re getting the lesser quality (again IMHO) digital model.
Nothing is approved yet. They say it will take up to five days to know if you’re getting approved, which is absurd. Then shipping could take weeks? Months?
No matter what, DO NOT USE YOUR COSORI AIR FRYER AGAIN. It is a severe hazard. Unplug it and put it away. but Cosori warns us not to take it to the dump yet.
The big question is whether Cosori can survive a two million machine recall. I’m confident that the answer will be a resounding no. That’s far too much of a slap in the face to consumers to ever rebound from that – but time, as it always does, will tell.
About Aron Solomon
A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the Chief Legal Analyst for Esquire Digital and the Editor-in-Chief for Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, YouTube, NewsBreak, and many other leading publications.