Hot take: my $35 rice cooker died at exactly 47 uses and I know the number because I kept the receipt in the box
Bought it at a Walmart in Dayton back in March and started joking with my roommate that we should tally every batch on the lid with a Sharpie. Got to 47 marks, went to make jasmine rice on a Sunday, and the switch just clicked and never came back on. Opened it up and one tiny wire had cooked itself black right at the heating plate. Anyone else have a cheap appliance die on a suspiciously round number or is the universe just messing with me?
That "47 marks on the lid with a Sharpie" thing is the real story here, because tracking it was the only reason you caught how fast it went. That wire cooked black right at the heating plate tells you everything, they use the thinnest gauge wire they can get away with and it's the heat cycling that kills it, not the number of uses. So every batch puts a little more stress on that one weak spot until the metal finally gives. Here's the part that gets me though, if you'd hit 46 or 48 you'd never have noticed, you'd have just tossed it and moved on like everyone else. The round number is a coincidence, but the dead wire at 47 uses is a design choice, somebody ran the math and figured the thing only needs to outlive the warranty. I'd bet real money that same cooker dies somewhere between 40 and 60 for almost everybody who owns one, they just never keep score. You basically ran a free test on a Walmart rice cooker and the results are exactly as sad as you'd guess.