No, sadly, but I may soon. My Benchmade collection is flourishing, however, so I don't really feel a need right now to add to it, where I think my Spyderco side could use more knives. As well as my Kershaw.
It's irrelevant, of course, as those were just two examples that were cognitively available to me at the moment of writing. We can find any number of examples to use here.
After re-reading the posts many times, I've isolated what I consider to be the main sub-arguments on the subject:
1: The cost of American manufacturing is so much higher than Chinese/Taiwanese (etc) that at least some stuff must be made in those places.
2: We ought not manufacture goods in certain countries because we're supporting bad governments (bad is a broad term...perhaps they exploit workers, have military aspirations that are unsavory...we'll fill this out later)
3: We shouldn't buy knives made in these countries due to a lack of quality.
4: Our economy needs all the help it can get, so we should go out of our way to buy American.
5: The reputation of some Asian goods is embarrassing, and we don't want the stigma of that stamped onto our blades.
These are incredibly complex arguments to flesh out in any meaningful way, but I'll do my best to evaluate their cogency. I will do this one post at a time.
I've already tackled argument 1 in my last post, but here's a bit more discussion. It's empirically false that knives made overseas will necessarily be available to the consumer at lower prices. I don't have access to the figures of the knife companies themselves to calculate just how much profits increase to go overseas, but it seems quite apparent that the consumer doesn't really benefit financially. Clearly, production is being shifted to China for both Benchmade and Spyderco, and they wouldn't do this if they didn't have a reason.
That said, Byrd knives and the lower end of Benchmade do seem to be available at very low prices despite reasonably good materials. Sadly, unlike the Sage, these models tend to use different steels and thus direct comparisons aren't available to us without knowledge of the cost of the material itself combined with the cost of manufacturing.
Thus, there appears to be some truth to the argument that migration to Asia lets the consumer get good products at lower prices.
However, I don't think this is a meaningful conclusion for two reasons. First off, we're mainly discussing Taiwanese manufacturing (which I find greatly preferable to China for reasons to be discussed in the other arguments), which, in the case of the Sage, is not getting us knives at lower prices in the real world.
The second answer is that the lower prices are irrelevant. I couldn't care less if you save me 10 or 20 dollars. I, and the average Spyderco/Benchmade/Kershaw consumer in the price range of the Sage, have the money to buy what we want and to satisfy preferences for preference's sake. I don't even care if the Spyderco is 300 dollars.
This company doesn't, and shouldn't, cater to the low end knife buyers. Spyderco is held to a higher standard, and with it, a relatively higher price. This is why I celebrate Spyderco's use of the Byrd brand to participate in that market--it doesn't dilute the brand name. Benchmade's choice to produce knives overseas and sell them at bargain prices while still using the Benchmade name to sell them is simply a bad call in the long term, even while it allows them to cash-out their reputation right now. While Spyderco is now utilizing Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturing with the Spyderco name, it seems to participate at higher quality and price levels which will result in a smaller dilution of the brand reputation, and, if its like Japanese manufacturing, in the long term Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturing may lack the stigma it does today.
But we're clearly not at that point now, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
So is the claim that Chinese/Taiwanese production is requisite due to price competition a good one? No. Spyderco buyers, as a market, are not that price sensitive (we don't seem to be troubled by spending 130 dollars on a knife), and significantly lower prices may actually hurt the brand name. Furthermore, Taiwanese manufacturing, of which our discussion is especially invested in, doesn't appear to significantly reduce prices for the consumer.
