The Kitchen Gadget That Is Never Worth Buying (It Just Wastes Precious Drawer Space)

Pretty much everyone has had that moment where you can't get a kitchen drawer to close. You know, the one filled to the brim with all kinds of metal, wood, and silicone utensils? While some specialized gadgets help you streamline getting dinner on the table on a busy Tuesday night, others are borderline useless, especially if they are only designed for a single purpose. Which tools have earned a permanent spot on your chopping block? Slicers, like those for avocados, strawberries, or eggs, are something you should get rid of when decluttering your kitchen.

Slicing gadgets share a fatal flaw: redundancy. They do a job that you could do faster and more efficiently with a knife. Think about all the time you spend fishing out that small plastic strawberry slicer from your drawer, using it, and then cleaning bits of fruit from the crevices once you're done. Does it really save you any time over a quick dice with a knife? Nine times out of ten, the answer is no.

These unitaskers (a term coined by food show presenter Alton Brown) seem appealingly useful at first glance. However, they're really not worth spending money on given how little they do. Your precious drawer space could be put to better use housing multi-purpose tools you can use for everything all the time. The storage problem gets worse the more single-use slicers you buy. These slicers are a monument to marketing hype over true utility, and are among the kitchen gadgets that are just a waste of money. Your kitchen — and the practical home cook you aspire to be — deserves better.

Thankfully, not all slicers are created equal. There are single-task tools that genuinely offer a non-replicable performance upgrade over a knife. These exceptional slicers are typically designed to handle larger, tougher, or oddly shaped produce. They're genuine time savers that justify their space-taking spot in your collection — heavy-duty slicers used for pineapples and apples come to mind. Those gadgets are worth keeping around since they do three important things: they are safer to use (especially when you're working with the tough skin and awkward shape of a pineapple), they keep things uniform (great for baking or fancy dinner presentations), and they save you a ton of time and effort.

Struggle to core and slice a whole pineapple or quickly sever an apple's core and cut it into eight even pieces? These tricky tasks are exactly where this kind of slicer shines. It's what earns these tools their title of specialized rather than single-use. However, even these utensils come with an important caveat: they are still only worth it if you eat the food often. If you're a daily apple devourer, a slicer tool is a must-have. If you buy a whole pineapple once a year for a family-favorite festive recipe, the gadget becomes just another piece of single-use clutter. Ultimately, any kitchen gadget is only worth buying if it saves you more time or effort than the storage space it needs. Unless, of course, you're willing to try some hacks to secretly add more storage to your kitchen.