Okay, now tell your SO or a friend or roommate to make the day's rice.

Rice cooking isn't terribly difficult, but a good rice cooker makes a very regular part of my meals something that is routine to prepare. And more importantly for me, makes it something that anyone can prepare, without supervision or trial and error.

Plus, there are a few other benefits: a good keep warm function that can keep rice in a pretty decent state for hours on end, timers, can cook brown rice unattended, lowering/increasing heat as needed, etc.

If you only eat rice once or twice a week, the counterspace a good rice cooker takes up probably isn't worth it. But if rice is a daily process? Then yeah, for me, a good rice cooker pays for itself pretty rapidly.