The Instant Pot is the right product at the right time, and by all indications, the vast majority of people who own one seem to adore it. Devotees of the device—often abbreviated as the “IP” online—sing its praises on social media, and Facebook in particular has been fertile ground for its word-of-mouth spread. When I asked around on my account, I expected mixed reactions; nothing is universally beloved on social media. But many people reported using their pots multiple times a week, and almost all of them were doing so to feed spouses and kids. A friend from high school, usually a bit of a curmudgeon, called his family’s Instant Pot “fairly amazing.” Another, the spouse of a college co-worker, said she uses hers to meal-prep for her household of 12. One guy said he and his wife were considering buying a third, smaller IP because they got so much use out of their first two.

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Even Kaitlin Garske, a social-media manager and food writer from Michigan who wrote a popular article about not being impressed with her own Instant Pot, can see the allure for others. “I have friends who don’t cook who got one for Christmas, and they were so happy to just put chicken in it and walk away,” she says.

That act of walking away seems like the pot’s most consistent draw. You don’t have to stir anything or monitor your food’s progress while using one, so although pressurizing and depressurizing it means many IP recipes actually don’t cut that much time off their traditional alternatives, they change how that time can be spent. According to the New Yorker food correspondent and kitchen-gadget aficionado Helen Rosner, that’s where the Instant Pot has an advantage over stove-top pressure cookers, which have been around for decades, especially in India and the Middle East. “You have to stand in the kitchen with those, and know how to use them, and monitor their behavior,” she says. With the Instant Pot, you just “set it and forget it.”

The pull of domestic multitasking is strong for American women. A recent study found that reducing time spent on household chores and performing multiple tasks at once are the main ways working mothers in the United States are able to dedicate time to their children, and the Instant Pot is optimized for efficiency not just in its use, but also in its acquisition. Amazon was long the only place to buy an Instant Pot, and according to Coco Morante, the author of an Instant Pot cookbook and founder of a half-million-member IP Facebook group, Amazon discounts are still such a huge sales driver that she can see them reflected in her membership. “Whenever there’s an Amazon sale, there’s a whole new crop of thousands of people who are excited about it,” she says. Buying an Instant Pot has never required price comparisons or shopping around: You get the sale alert, you add the item to your cart, it’s in your home in two days.