On the other hand, if you order a whole pile of heavy stuff, you may end up with a bargain.
Benchmade is not well set up to process "retail" orders. They don't have in place yet the mechanisms to tell in advance what shipping on an order will actually cost. Some mail order sellers base their shipping on the price of the item(s), orders totalling $0-50 add $3.95 for S&H, $51-100 add $5.95, $101-200 add $7.95, etc. But, in the case of knives, the weight of the item isn't well-related to the weight and size of the item. The actual cost to ship an item is based on weight and size, so that wouldn't work well for BM. The average BM knife costs over $100 and BM expects that most folks who will go to the trouble of ordering directly from them will be ordering several knives at one time. So, BM decided to simply add a flat fee of $10 to all orders for S&H.
Keep in mind that there's an H in S&H. The S if for shipping. This is what UPS or USPS or whoever charges BM. There's no profit for BM here. The H is for handling. This is the cost of having an employee who earns a salary and benefits take a cart into the wearhouse, find each item on your order, and bring them out. It's the cost of having another employee double-check that order. Then, having an employee select an appropriate box, add packing curls, put the knives in, tape it all up, put the shipping label on, and take it out to the dock. Don't forget the cost of the box, the curls, and the tape too.
The average UPS shipping cost on a couple of knives is probably about $4.
A new box, curls, tape, shipping label, etc, cost upwards of $2. Boxes are expensive and using cheap ones or used ones just leads to shipping dammage.
So, there's four bucks left for labor. If a BM employee can process your order in ten minutes, get the material, check it, pack it, tape it, label it, get it out to the dock in ten minutes, then that's 1/6 of one hour. That means that that employee can earn $24/hour salary AND benefits plus other overhead costs of employment. Generally, your take-home pay is about half of what it costs your employeer to have you. So, that makes the employee's salary $12/hour and that's on the low-end even for shipping clerks these days.
Bottom line: my guess is that even with a $10 flat fee, BM is barely breaking even overall on shipping and handling for their new direct sales experiment.
So, how do other big mail-order places make do on lower rates? Primarily by wearhouse automation. BM's operation just isn't big enough yet to have that.
Finally, keep in mind that when offering direct sales, BM has be careful not to tread to hard on the toes of their established dealers and brick-and-mortar retailers. Quite honestly, they're not out to offer you a bargain.
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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.balisongcollector.com
