All comments so far have made some pretty substantial legal errors. For your benefit (and I mean that sincerely), I'd recommend learning some basics about doing business in countries like the USA and Canada and basic contract law so that you don't end up in a legal battle over something more substantial. I would collect on my purchase against Mr. Ostroff in court had this been a multi-thousand dollar purchase, but one would need to be either unnecessarily wealthy or somewhat insane to litigate over a sub-$200 knife.
But it is somewhat amusing to have the legal opinions of a law student belittled in these vitriolic posts.
Admins, feel free to close or delete the thread as you wish. It's clear nothing productive will be accomplished. People will merely assume I'm lying (I suppose?) and see me as some huge jerk for asking the knife to be looked at before shipping.
I will not reply again unless Mr. Ostroff chooses to defend himself here or something productive is said, although I probably won't be reading any non-TNK posts anyway. I'm sure my apparent opponents will enjoy "defending" their friend by claiming I'm some sort of jerk--although in my 6+ years of knife purchasing, I've never had a knife deal go bad and in my multi-thousands of posts I've never had any problems here. But don't let my 5 or so year productive history here bother you--no doubt I had a total personality switch when dealing with this one particular company.
At any rate, again, enjoy your ranting against me, just be assured you're not doing TNK any favors, you're not hurting my feelings, and you're factually and legally incorrect.
Some of the following posts as I posted this had meritorious comments/questions:
"Regardless of how a customer is being and/or acting (I'm not saying you where out of line) there is never a good reason to be rude or mean to a customer, if in fact you feel he was. But, maybe he was not in a good mood or was just given some bad news or something to that effect." I think this is reasonable. People have bad days, and some people have really bad days. As I suggested here, this service is extremely anomalous given TNK's great reputation here and I'm open to the idea that this was the case.
I was nothing but nice to Mr. Ostroff--I spoke politely, calmly and sincerely. If he has a recording of our conversation, I consent here for that to be posted, although I accept that this is rather unlikely. Were he to have such a recording, I promise that it would be highly embarrassing to him. As per my law firm, I'm only in my second year of law school, but I was employed by a respected family law firm last summer, although what relevance to my (excellent) knowledge of contracts that might have I'm not sure.
I apologize for the dealer question--when someone wrote "if I had a customer like that, I'd refuse him too" or something to that effect, the implication seemed to me that he actually does have customers--in which case, I'd like to (politely) avoid that business.
As per the interesting comments on what flawless would require, I will try my sincere best to reproduce the comment I submitted with my order for your evaluation.
"I'd like this knife to be flawless. By that I mean a centered blade, no blade play and free of other defects. Please look it over before processing my order, and if it has a problem, please email me and cancel my order. Thanks."
Similar requests have been respected for more than 5 years by NGK and recently by Sooner State Knives. Perhaps TNK represents a baseline standard of fair dealing in the knife business and NGK and Sooner State are simply excellent/superior.
But I think the most philosophically and legally interesting question is whether or not ANY knife could be flawless. The question is legally and factually irrelevant in the sense that I defined flawless in my comment to TNK, but let's suppose I hadn't and evaluate the legal consequences of that decision.
Several posters have commented that, under their definition of flawless (presumably they mean an objective definition), that request would always be unreasonable because it is literally unobtainable. I would suggest that, if they are correct, the term would simply be read differently--as near perfect, or so on, as no contracting party would demand the literally impossible--so the term would be read with the probable definition of near-perfect.
But, while we're on the subject of legal theory, I'd like to suggest a legal out for TNK. Normally, an offer + acceptance will constitute a contract even if the funds are not withdrawn. If you think about it, this happens all the time--for instance, when you contract to sale Item X to Company Y, once a month, for a period of 12 months, starting next January.
At any rate, TNK's lawyer might claim that my comment constituted an additional term that wasn't impliedly accepted by the online transaction--computer-operated transactions can't possibly take into account new terms to sales contracts.
Of course, this would suppose that my request for my product to be free of defects was a new term. In fact, there's an implied warranty of merchantability of use in all sales not sold "as is." Arguably, then, there was no new term at all, merely make an explicit an otherwise implicit term.
In addition, some of commented that he merely followed my comment quite literally. Nonetheless, there is a legally required obligation of "good faith and fair dealing" in all contracts. I'd argue that reading my conditions as logically impossible, as opposed to a more reasonable reading (which was quite simple, given that I defined what to look for) would violate that (enforceable) condition.
Anyway, it's been fun. Hopefully future customers will turn this post up on a search and learn from my experience.
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