The ZipSnip makes easy work of cutting down big boxes. But it can also help with plastic packaging, fabric, carpet and more — anything that's less than a 1/4-inch thick. (Rick Broida/Yahoo)
In my line of work — reviewing products for Yahoo — I encounter a lot of cardboard boxes. If you're a regular online shopper, I bet you do, too. As we all know, those boxes need to be cut down to fit in recycling bins and/or comply with recycling-pickup requirements. And, as we also know, trying to do that with standard scissors is... not fun. Enter the Worx ZipSnip Cordless Electric Scissors, which can plow through cardboard, clamshell packaging, fabric and even carpet like a hot knife through butter. That's the promise, anyway, and if you've seen the breathlessly enthusiastic TikTok videos about this thing, it seems to be the reality as well. Is it? Here's my Worx ZipSnip review.
VERDICT: You can have this back when you pry it out of my cold, dead, guard-protected fingers.
Imagine a pizza cutter on steroids; that's the ZipSnip in a nutshell. It's a handheld rotary slicer that runs on a rechargeable battery. An included AC adapter charges it, though I wish Worx had opted for a USB-C charging port. Now there's one more power-tool plug I have to label and hope doesn't get misplaced.
Worx promises the ZipSnip will hold its charge for months, but doesn't specify exactly how much runtime you'll get. And because there's no battery gauge, there's no way to know when power is running low.
Using the tool couldn't be much simpler: Press the safety-lock button and then squeeze the trigger, which is appreciably long so you can hold it with your whole hand, not just a single finger. Then just slide the ZipSnip along whatever you want to cut, as long as it's no thicker than a quarter-inch — the maximum depth allowed by the blade guard.
Speaking of which, the octagonal blade is mostly protected from accidental contact, though it's exposed a bit along the lower side and completely open at the front. Obviously you need to be careful with any cutting tool; this one seems very safe overall, but anyone with smaller fingers should exercise added caution.
True story: I decided to buy the ZipSnip when faced with the cardboard remnants of a 98-inch TV. (Like I said: I review products for Yahoo.) There was simply no way a scissors was going to make that massive box recycle bin-friendly.
And it worked great. The hot-knife-through-butter analogy is pretty spot-on, and I found it almost fun to carve up all that cardboard. However, one of the inside-the-box planks was thicker than 1/4 inch, and so the ZipSnip was of zero help there; it simply couldn't fit it.
I also cut open one of those accursed clamshell packages; it worked, but only because there was room enough for the blade to pass along the edge. With a thicker or square package, that might not be the case.
Obviously any cutter works well only if it has a sharp blade, and the ZipSnip is pretty clever in this regard: It has a built-in self-sharpening system that works while you use it. Of course, eventually, the blade will wear out; it would be nice if Worx included a spare, but you'll have to buy extras yourself. At this writing, a 2-pack of ZipSnip replacement blades sells for about $12.
As a general rule I don't love single-purpose tools, especially those with proprietary charging cords. But I'll absolutely make an exception for the ZipSnip. It's significantly faster and easier to use than a manual scissors and certainly beneficial to anyone suffering from arthritis or other dexterity challenges.
At $42, it's a little on the expensive side, but sale pricing sometimes brings it as low as $33. If you're not in a hurry, you might want to wait.
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