Kitchen appliances vary both in price and performance. Decide what function you need before shopping.
Looking for small kitchen appliances without this prior idea leads to confusing multitude of functions and features. Say, a blender can be a juicer as well, two appliances for the price of one and a half! Turned out I don't make juices: to messy, too expensive, and children prefer smoothes made in a blender anyway. A $200 Krups blender's motor burned after a year of reasonable use. Next blender was $35 Black & Decker, and it lasted three years. It is regrettably dead for two weeks now, I think I'll get the same thing. But even after three years of happy ownership I have no idea why I would want its fourteen speeds. All this cool elongated grippy buttons are just a hell to clean.
Choosing my appliances, I can go two ways: If I'm not going to use something often, or cannot see the difference between models, I get the cheapest, sometimes used pieces. Actually, used and still working is more reliable than crappy brand new. If I know exactly what I need and have an idea of an ideal model, I'm looking for something closest to this ideal. It is most likely to be the best on the market and in the highest price range. It's not automatically most expensive, because there can be extra charges for import, for design, for "coolness", which I don't get and never did, anyway. My hand-held mixer at $17 (as far as I recall) in Target is a good example of the cheap way. I just don't see what it could do to justify more sophisticated model, because my stand mixer KitchenAid Professional 520, being a good example of "best" way, mixes very well.
See also: kitchen, stand mixer, kitchen knives, knife sharpening, coffee grinder, frying pan.