I go to a local small coffee shop every Sunday with friends. The owners wanted to expand their business to attract more families (unfortunately as far as I’m concerned), so they bought a type of Japanese soft serve ice cream machine that also makes “Taiaki”, a fish shaped hollow waffle cone, selling for over $10 per cone! (This shop is in a well to do town…). When the machine arrived, it sat there for months not hooked up, so I asked them why and they said their landlord’s electrician connected it but it trips the breaker and he couldn’t figure it out, so they were waiting (for months) to get a factory technician out there. I looked at it and found the problem, similar to what’s being described here: mislabeled, all in Japanese. I used Google Lens to translate the nameplate; it needed 200V (Japan voltage), instructions said 120V. But I also saw that it had no UL label and I told them to check with their insurance about installing a non-listed machine. Sure enough, the insurance company came back and said they would either cancel them, or at best, add a rider disallowing payment for any damages associated with that machine. I was not appreciated for pointing that out… But they were able to get the vendor to send them a different machine that was UL listed, it just cost them something like $2k more plus freight both ways. It also needed 208V, which they didn’t have, so they had to install a transformer for it. That’s a lot of trouble for an ice cream machine if you ask me… I hardly ever see anyone buying it, but I’m only there in Sunday mornings. Apparently it’s a hit after school on weekdays. So rich kids buying $10+ ice cream cones after school, not something I would have been able to do!
