Pinnah, what do you want to say with your answer? What I want to get to know is: Why is the quality of the two knives I got from the Buck custom shop worse than the quality of the factory knives I can buy at Sears, Cabelas or anywhere else?
Haebbie
Haebbie, short version is that American labor is in a weaker position than in Europe and one of things this leads to is that it becomes harder for US manufacturing companies to consistently produce high quality products unless they more fully automate (which is also hard on labor).
With respect to Cabelas and Sears... Large retailers have more buying power and can demand different QA levels in bulk. As an example... When Patagonia was still using classic Polartec 300 (which they sold under the tradename Synchilla), they had a very high QA standard from the fleece they would accept from Malden Mills (the factory near me that produced it). LL Bean had a much lower QA standard which allowed them to sell at a much lower price point. I used to buy fleece directly from the Malden Mills factory store and you could see significant variation in the quality of the fleece and one of the workers explained how the QA process was tied to contracts from large buyers.
I would expect the Cabela's Bucks to have more consistent QA (huge order size hence huge buying power) than Buck's custom shop (small order size and less buying power).