I’m getting ready to make a big move and needed a paper shredder to safely remove the miles of documents that have accumulated in my office over the past few years. I thought it was a blessing when I got an email last week from Chase Bank notifying me that I had spent enough money using their debit card to have accumulated the proper amount of “reward points” needed for the Royal JS800 Paper Shredder. I immediately put in the order and it only took 5 days before the thing arrived.

I became frustrated with the paper shredder immediately. While these things have never worked exceptionally well for me, this thing was easily the worst of the worst. For every 5 minutes of shredding I was able to do, I spent about 10-20 minutes having to clear paper jams from the blades of the thing.

The icing on the cake with this piece of shit came 2 days after I received the product. As I was shredding papers awaiting my next jam, the back of the shredder started smoking and suddenly a ball of fire shot out the back of the thing. Luckily, I wasn’t injured, but it’s pretty easy to imagine that someone could have been.

As if this weren’t bad enough, when I placed a call to Royal’s Product Support Hotline, I was given the address of a Post Office Box in Summerset, New Jersey and instructed to write them a letter about my issue with this product, while being assured once my letter was received- Royal would be glad to replace the product. “Is there a phone number I can call?”, I asked the Product Support Rep. “No sir. No phone number. We have fax number for them. No phone.”, the operator replied. I asked for a supervisor, which this guy apparently didn’t have, so the CEO of the Royal Company who is also their only member of the Product Support Department was absolutely no help to me.

I’m still trying to figure out my next step with this, but I’m not a big fan of electronics blowing up in my face, so for now I’ll just make sure to give the company some really bad PR and hope that anyone considering buying anything from Royal will read this and reconsider.

Check the pictures below to see what a great product Royal has put on the market.