My wife is a pretty active researcher when we need to buy appliances and other expensive household goods, so I don't pay a ton of attention to what we end up getting.

The one major miss was our coffee maker: it's an OXO, but I'm not sure what model. It clogs and overflows just often enough to be really annoying, but not often enough to buy a new one.

At some point I developed a heuristic of buying the median priced option whenever I have little specific knowledge about a product class (which is most of the time). My rationale is that the cheapest option is probably garbage that only sells because of it's price and the most expensive option probably has a bunch of qualities that I neither need nor care about.