The convenience of the traditional kitchen slow cooker in the home means found time for some ... and a missed opportunity for others...

It is no big stretch to suggest that the many loyal slow cooker users out there consider the convenience factor of the appliance to be a primary reason for its continued popularity and longevity. The fact that you can pretty much prepare an entire meal (or at least an impressive entre) within one solitary kitchen appliance is a pretty key reason for someone with a hectic daily schedule to want to incorporate something with such a benefit into their routine. Obviously for many individuals the only reason they are regular Crock Pot users, for example, is that the crock-pot slow cooker appliance allows them to prepare all of the necessary ingredients for a delicious meal with as minimal an effort as a person may choose to invest, and subsequently free them up to get other important tasks and duties taken care of while the slow cooker does its thing. I say 'obviously' because I would figure that the opportunity that the traditional slow cooker gives you to take advantage of freed up time is intrinsic to its increasing popularity. Well it seems that I might be wrong to make such an assumption on behalf of all loyal slow cooker users; it seems, at least from some recent interactions with a few different crock pot users, that for some loyal afficianodoes of the slow cooker in general and the Rival Crock Pot in particular, that they don't really feel the urge to fill up their new found free time with non-cooking activities. Understand that I am not talking here about people that use the extra time that their slow cooker gives them to make more elaborate side dishes. Oh no, there are apparently individuals out there who feel that the time taken for a meal to slowly cook to perfection is time best spent not straying too far from the kitchen. That the four, five or six hours that it might tsake for their slow cooker to complete the cooking process is not time to spend out shopping, out having acoffee with friends, out at the movies or the library or even just out enjoying a stroll in the park, byut instead that it is time best spent being not too far from the kitchen, 'just in case'. Yes, these people have learned to only partly appreciate the freedom that their slow cookers have bestowed upon them; they have learned to appreciate that their kitchen appliance has given them the freedom to wait around five or six hours for their meal to prepare itself while they themselves ... wait for it. I don't know, maybe they just need someone to give them the number of a good self-help group. Maybe they just need a good old-fashioned intervention. Or maybe they just need to turn off the television and unplug it and realize that time spent at home alone (if not spent working on and completing some meaningful project or somesuch, or even reading a good book) is time well wasted. For a loyal slow cooker user to fall into this apathetic trap seems to me to be a real shame. The time freeing benefits of a Crock Pot or any other brand of slow cooker seem to me to be painfully obvious - especially seeing as how you can now buy yourself a slow cooker that you can program to start its cooking process at a predetermined time as well as to keep the finished product at a 'keep warm' temperature for a set amout of time afterwards. This is all just more found-time for the right person. This is even more obvious to me than the fact that a loyal crock pot user can oftentimes save them self the expense of a brand new crock pot - and keep their current trusted slow cooker appliance functioning smoothly for quite a long time in their kitchen in the process, if they just purchase the right Rival crock pot replacement parts if and wnen they are needed. Of course that is probably a whole different issue to get into at another time...