shark tank - knife sharpening mail service?

D

dirc

Joined
Jan 31, 2018
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I honestly just think - wow... people really go thru the hassle of mailing knives to get them sharpened?

anyway, comments?
thoughts?
 
Lots of people think that there is some level of voodoo witchcraft associated with knife sharpening. I would suspect even the cavemen had a revered flint expert in the clan.

I could understand (sort of) this mentality 10,000 years ago. Heck, I could even understand it before the invention of the world wide web machine. But now there are hundreds of sharpening videos online. And a few of them are actually good. ;)

But most non-knife people don't understand (or want to) just how easy and inexpensive it is to sharpen your own knives. Of course, a good percentage of the non-knife population have never used a truly sharp knife, and this pay-to-sharpen service just adds to the mystique when a butter knife comes back to them as a light saber.
 
I didn't watch the video, but in my experience I would guess maybe 10-20% of my customers and people I bump into know how to actually sharpen a knife. I would say maybe another 40% could get a working edge, Or at least grind out the big chips but wouldn't be able to make them shave. The other half or so has no clue so there is probably a market for such a service. I have met several that will send there 300$ blades back to get re-sharpened. I never understood how someone will have thousands of dollars in blades, and not spend an hour on you tube to know how to sharpen them correctly...
 
the whole $10/blade thing just seems hilarious to me, I mean, the hassle alone of doing all that is 4 times the effort to just strop it yourself
you don't need $200 waterstones, heck, just a good steel + strop and you're set for all practical use

if you just use a strop from a good starting point, you're also set -> good vid
 
That video brought back memories of my Grampa using his barber's strop to "edge-up" a knife.
Thanks!
 
People are willing to pay for convenience, and simply not having to do it themselves. Nothing unusual about that.

How many people pay to have the oil changed in their vehicle? Or pay for a car wash? Or pay to have their lawn mowed? Or pay someone to make them a sandwich or fry them up a burger? Or any number of other mundane tasks that they could do themselves if they really wanted to?

I don't look down on people who pay others to sharpen their knives. Heck, ask those members of this forum who offer knife sharpening services, and get paid for it, how they feel about it.

And then there are restaurants (where knife edges often get ruined). Just as they pay to have their laundry done (towels, tablecloths, etc), some owners/managers find it more convenient to pay someone to sharpen all of their knives once in a awhile (who knows, maybe they can write it off on their taxes as a "business expense").

I prefer to do most things myself (including knife sharpening), but there are still things I'm willing to pay others to do for me out of convenience. I'll sometimes pay someone to make me a sandwich/burrito/etc, pay someone to change the tires on my bikes (although I take the wheels off myself), pay someone to do my taxes, even though I could do all of these things myself.

How many people would be out of a job if everyone were %100 self-reliant and did everything for themselves. The economy would collapse.
 
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JeremiahWeaver09 said:
stores like home depot should just have a little section that offers this service on site instead of even having to mail it in
Click to expand...
there are sharpening businesses in about every town that has restaurants and has businesses that use tools to be sharpened. they sharpen their knives, cutlery and tools. problem is simple...sharpening takes time, effort and skill. I see so much botched sharpening done even by sharpening pros I couldn't imagine home depot pulling that off. their corporate culture of low paid labor and hiring with very low to nonexistant skills. I can only see it fail and badly. maybe I'm just a pessimist though. course if consumer is gonna botch up worse than home depot low paid sharpener..maybe that aint so bad to the consumer.
 
I remember when I got my first CRK and took it to a local old timer for a sharpening, he grabbed my knife and said, son, this is a CRK, ive met Chris numerous times, why are you bringing this to me? From that time, I really dove deep into learning how to sharpen my own knives. It’s very relaxing and stress relieving to just sharpen knives now a days and knowing how sharp I can get em.
 
Its an odd economic question. If you had good gear, expected to pay for the gear every five years (plus profit) and had a reasonable takehome income, you'd have to work pretty hard to keep it going. Specialist stuff, maybe. When StraightRazorPlace was going strong I think there were maybe a dozen guys making a decent side hustle, and two or three full time sharpening razors. We are talking at the peak of popularity for straights in the late 00s early 10s, and that included restorations, buying and hand tuning Chinese straights. Not a huge market, and no one doing it for money alone. And those were often when guys were putting up around 50USD per blade for a simple hone. Not a great "per hour" in the long tail of things.
I've seen the work left behind by some of the "restaurant" sharpeners, and even casually looked into it when one of the local guys was retiring and going to sell up. He had been working hard for not a lot.

I'm sure that there are guys who find a niche and make it work for themselves, but its one of those things where the distance between the top and bottom pay is massive, but the whole industry is a few thousand folks. Its kinda going the way of "general repair" shops, the guys who could cut a key, fix a shoe and replace a battery. Sure every mall still has one, but they are solidly in the middle of the easy part of the work. Gone are the days where that guy was a real craftsman who could handling anything really complex.
 
It always amazed me to find people who are so non mechanical, they can't do simple things, like change a faucet, assemble an item.

But there are lots of people who can't. In terms of sharpening, sometimes people have to desire to do it, and a mentor to show them how to do it.

I will say, I do read the assembly instructions, before putting pieces together.

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