Everybody's talking about it! For some reason!

BlenderBottle, huh? Seems like a useful item in some situations, like making protein shakes, or instant drinks, or baby formula, or even stuff like pancake mix and scrambled eggs. It’s a cup with a lid and a little wire whisk ball inside. You shake it up and the whisk helps mix the ingredients. Pretty neat if you think you might need that kind of thing.

None of which really explains why this has more than 13,000 reviews on Amazon.

Just to put that in perspective, Amazon’s top-selling kitchen item, the Brita Water Filter Pitcher, has about 4,100 reviews. Mad Max: Fury Road has 6,700. The current generation of the Kindle freaking Fire only has 5,300.

What the hell?

Most impressively, the number of reviews is growing every day. This isn’t a case of one big burst of reviews, which could conceivably be engineered or manipulated. Check the “Most Recent Customer Reviews” sidebar: every single day, another dozen or two customers stroll in to express their feelings about the seemingly humble BlenderBottle.

All we can think is that the kind of people who are looking for the ultimate protein-shake, uh, shaker
tend to be highly focused on subjects like this. To flabby normals like us, this choice of one shaking bottle over another is a trivial matter. To the highly tuned biological machines who walk among us, every edge matters, and no detail is too small to merit close attention.

They also tend to be highly motivated to share their knowledge with their fellow enthusiasts. If you’re optimizing your protein intake to the milligram, and you find a vessel that enables (or, for a few percent of the reviewers, fails to enable) that regimen, that’s a scientific breakthrough worth publishing a report about.

We also have to assume there’s an element of friendly competition at work here. You haven’t just found the best way to mix your shake - you’ve completed a race. Posting an Amazon review about it is like sticking that 26.2 sticker on your car, a way to proclaim your achievement.

Do we really understand 13,000 posts’ worth of hubbub over this thing? No. Are we glad there are freaky obsessives willing to pore through the finer points of plastic types and drip-proof seals for the edification of the public? You better believe it. If you’re one of them, thanks. You guys not only make our business possible, you shift the balance of knowledge - in other words, power - toward consumers, changing the whole world of buying and selling for the better. We’re just kind of surprised there are so many of you.