I was mentioning to my mom that I had recently gotten a good little coffee maker for $20, but that all the electric kettles were $30-$40. My mom calmly said that that was because Americans don’t buy kettles, so they have to cost more due to the economy of scale.
Is this true? Don’t you use electric kettles?
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Are you a turtle?
The electric kettles I’ve seen are mostly of the college dorm room “hotpot” size - perfect for making ramen soup, a box of macaroni and cheese, or some quick hot chocolate.
Once we’ve got a place of your own with a microwave and stove, most of us bid a fond farewell to the electric kettle.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good dipped in chocolate.
And since we usually only make tea by the cup, the stove top tea kettle is just fine. Or put the cup of water in the microwave, and voila!
Matt, I had never seen (nor heard of) real full-size electric kettles until I moved from the U.S. to Canada.
As an aside, my spouse and I once conducted an experiment: we held a tea kettle race, pitting the electric kettle against the stove top model.
The electric kettle won, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
I am proud to say I own a full size electric kettle, as does every other member of my family. We all drink tea several times a day (we’re brits) Stove top kettles take much longer to heat, and the mcrowave never seems to get the water actually boiling. I say yay for my electric kettle.
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I have a kettle!! I love it, too! It’s this marbly colored, funky shaped one with a curly-wired handle. I hold it near & dear and got it at a garage sale for $5. 
I don’t see how I could ever heat water for coffee, tea or cocoa any other way than with a kettle.
Maybe it’s just the romanticist in me that adores being able to heat up the water and pour it into my little mug & tea bag on a sunny spring morning while listening to the birdies chirp outside my window. sigh
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Ooh ooh! I had an electric kettle. That thing was great! It must have disappeared at some point during my many college-era moves.
And I am a native-born, full-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool, flag-waving, tax-paying, jury-duty-serving, Chevy-driving, gun-toting AMERICAN!!
(All right, so I don’t have a gun, and I drive a Toyota. So sue me.)
I haven’t seen an electric kettle. I didn’t even know they made them. Then again I don’t drink cofee or tea, only water.
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While electric kettles may be pretty rare in the U.S., most kitchens do have coffee makers. My husband’s family, visiting from Australia, said they knew they must be in America when they saw my coffee maker on the counter (I guess their 30 hour trip and the line at customs hadn’t convinced them). They stayed at a hotel during their trip and were extremely annoyed that management couldn’t provide them with an electric kettle. My father-in-law thought that if they were stupid enough not to have them on hand, they should at least have been willing to run out and buy one for them. It completely blew away all the stories he’d heard about American customer service.
If you don’t have an electric kettle, but have a coffee maker, you can achieve rapidly boiled water by just running it through the coffee maker without any coffee in it.
I also have a full-sized electric kettle – I learned about them living in England, and as soon as I saw one in a dept store here I grabbed it immediately.
It’s true you can put water through the coffee maker sans coffee, but when I do that, the watewr still has a vaguely coffeeish taste that is n’t so great in tea.
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Never seen an electric kettle either, but then aren’t many Americans more or less coffee drinkers. I have a stove top tea kettle. I use it to make an occasional cup of tea or boil water for other reasons. I make a big pot of tea with my coffee maker now, although for years I boiled my water and steeped my tea. You see I’m Southern I do drink tea pretty much everyday, iced tea.
Needs2know
Well what about the price, huh? It’s my impression that gas stoves are not as common in the UK or Ireland, so there’s not much difference in price between using an electric stove or an electric kettle to oils your water. However, gas stoves are more common in America, and everyone knows it is cheaper to use gas than electricity to heat something, so why use an electric kettle? Especially if you drink enough tea to warrant going out to buy an electric kettle in the first place.
Well, that’s my theory and I’m sticking by it. 
PeeQueue
Just to recap the Canadian position: my parents have an electric kettle (and they’re certainly not poor or students.) My apartment came with a coffee maker, so when it busted, I got another coffee maker.
(Actually, the coffee maker didn’t break; the carafe did. But the carafe cost $17, and the whole coffee maker only cost $20. How weird is that?)
Portwest wrote:
So, how fast can an electric kettle sprint the 100-meter dash? 
I had an electric kettle when I lived in Israel (they’re kum kums there). EVERYONE had one - you could see them in all the dorm windows - and I miss it tremendously. I have seen them a couple times since returning to the U.S., but rarely. I plan on getting a kum kum for my coffee-addicted parents for their anniversary. They seem to be more expensive here in the US, unfortunately.
Why is everyone talking about boiling water? I thought the question related to making tea… If you make tea with boiling water, it just means that you have to wait longer before it’s cool enough to drink. I find that microwaving a cup on high for about 2 and a half minutes gets it about the right temperature, without boiling.
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Just chiming in in case someone is taking a poll: my mother is British, living here in the States and she has an electric tea kettle.
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Sorry about the hijack, but the talk about the mini sized “dorm kettle” got me thinking about another ingenius water heater used overseas. It’s a little coil called an immersion heater. you clip it to your cup, plug it in and presto.
I think the popularity of these and the electric kettles abroad is due to the use of 220 volt current there. I finally found an immersion heater for my travel kit and was disapointed. Our wimpy 110 just doesn’t do the same job.
Chronos:
Boiling also removes the oxygen that is normally desolved in water. I have heard from some purists that this affedcts the taste of tea. Personally, my palate is not tuned to subleties, so I don’t know.