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🗓️ Our 2019 year in review

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Our top guides, picks, reader comments, deals, and more

From a flurry of Coffee Week blog posts to the hottest Cyber Week deals, the past few months have been a blur. We’ve been busy this year at Wirecutter, to say the least.

Taking stock of 2019, we now have a full-time staff of 145 people living and working all over the US and Canada, and we opened a cosmic new flagship office in New York City, not far from our colleagues at The New York Times.

The new testing, storage, photography, and working spaces have enabled us to engage in some bonkers, bucket-list-level testing of everything from washing machines to Wi-Fi routers to innerspring mattresses (full guide coming soon!). We can’t wait to share more with you in 2020. Thank you for reading our guides, watching our videos, and subscribing to this newsletter. Read on for more highlights, below.


— Annam Swanson, managing editor

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Our top 5 guides

These were the most-read reviews in 2019

Our top 5 picks

These were the most-purchased picks by readers in 2019

Most requested

We received a lot of reader requests for new guides this year. Here are some of the most popular requests from 2019:

  • Electric bicycles (we fulfilled a related top request, electric scooters, this year)
  • Insurance (health, homeowners, and auto)
  • Portable grocery carts
  • Online banks
  • Solar outdoor lighting

We also received several requests to help readers find solid replacements for single-use items; we’ve got you covered with our new guide to The Best Reusable Produce Bags, Beeswax Wraps, and Other Ways to Reduce Plastic Waste. Readers who have been asking for weighted-blanket recommendations can rest easy (perhaps under one of our new picks). And those who wrote to us about wallets and trail cameras may be pleased to hear that both guides are in the works for 2020.

Is there another topic you want to see on our site? Write to us!

Comment highlights

As our catalog has grown, so has our network of engaged readers. In 2019, nearly 24,000 comments were posted across our site. These are some of our favorite reader comments from this year, collected and annotated by our community team:

nrpardee on The Best Wi-Fi Router

Any roundup of excellent comments on Wirecutter would be incomplete without a mention of nrpardee. This comment about our former top pick in The Best Wi-Fi Router was helpful to us, helpful to other readers, informed and informative, and kind. Getting a report that HP’s Direct Print feature may cause intermittent outages provided us the info we needed to investigate the issue directly, and it helped us troubleshoot with other readers encountering the same problem. A thousand thanks, nrpardee.

essceebee on The Best Bath Towel

We appreciate a couple aspects of these comments on our review of The Best Bath Towel: first, that essceebee took the time to come back and apologize (which is not an easy thing to do on the Internet), and second, that the cat was the saboteur all along.

Rob on 8 Wirecutter Staffers on the Online Coffee Subscriptions They Love

On our blog post about coffee subscription services we love, we asked for your personal recommendations. In response, Rob shared this excellent spreadsheet comparing more than two dozen coffee subscription services, and it blew us away. When it comes to comparative data, please do give us what you’ve got—we’re unequivocally, unabashedly 100 percent here for it.

Read more in our post about the best reader comments in 2019. If you have suggestions or questions, leave us a comment on the post.

Deals by the numbers

We share less than one percent of the deals we review daily, yet this year we surfaced nearly 6,000 Wirecutter-approved deals. During Cyber Week alone, we scanned 77,653 deals and posted 709. Here are some of the best deals we found this year, curated and annotated by our deals team:

Jabra Elite 85H Bluetooth Noise-Cancelling Headphones from Amazon
Deal price: $200. Street price: $300.
When we first saw one color of our top-pick noise-cancelling headphones drop to $200 in September, we thought it was an outlier. It turned out that it portended an excellent late-year drop. These headphones were often $300, with sales at $250, in 2019, so the additional drop of $50 was a very welcome one.

Lands’ End Supima Non-Skid Bath Rug from Lands’ End
Deal price: $15 with free shipping. Street price: $30. 
A coupon code for 50 percent off worked for all sizes and colors of our top-pick bath mat. Free shipping under the $75 minimum is rare, and we typically see it only a couple of times a year. So stacking the 50 percent promotion with the free shipping results in the best possible pricing you can get from Lands’ End.

Vitamix 5200 Blender from Amazon

Deal price: $260. Street price: $400.

A highlight of Black Friday 2019: This model saw a new low price, beating previous Prime Day deal pricing by $20. This deal on our top-pick blender made the Vitamix a huge seller and a reader favorite for as long as stock was around.

MacBook Air (2019, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) from Amazon

Deal price: $800. Street price: $1,000.

It’s very unusual to see a price drop on any MacBook, so it was great to see this dip on a recommended budget model on Black Friday. Unfortunately, everyone else seemed to agree that this was an excellent price. So the sale didn’t make it past the early evening. In fact, it disappeared and didn’t return on Cyber Monday, as such sales usually do (stock permitting).

Tulo Comfort (Medium, Queen) from Tulo

Deal price: $400. Street price: $700.

At $400 with two free pillows (admittedly, they’re neither recommended nor very nice pillows, per our writers and readers), this was easily the best mattress value we saw this year, coming on Cyber Monday. Tulo was more often at $600 than $700 in 2019, before a late-year price hike, but this drop to $400 surprised even us for a mattress that tested better than bigger-name options. (It’s our favorite foam model under $1,000.)

Instant Pot Duo 6-Quart from Walmart, Target, and Amazon

Deal price: $50. Street price: $80 or more.

2019 marked the first time we saw our top-pick electric pressure cooker consistently break the $50 threshold, with models priced as low as $49 across retailers at points during both Prime Day and Black Friday. This drop seems relatively common now, but at the time it was shocking.

Don’t want to miss out on great deals on our top picks? Make sure to sign up for our Daily Deals newsletter.