- Joined
- Feb 28, 2002
- Messages
- 7,636
What other measure is there when we're considering completely subjective terms? By itself, "Good" is meaningless; specifically, it means different things to different people. I therefore believe that the measure of whether a knife is "good" or "bad" is whether the customer is satisfied with it and whether he or she received adequate value at the price point. That's a fancy way of saying the knife has to be considered in context.
No, a United folder or fixed blade is a not a heavy-use tool-steel blade, but it doesn't (or shouldn't) cost as much as one, either. If it holds up to light daily use, such as in the case of the average United locking folding knife, it's done its job, hasn't it? That's "good" to me. "Bad" would be a knife whose lock fails or that has other manufacturer's defects. I've been pleased, for example, with the Taiwanese import United knives I've purchased in the past, though granted that was a few years ago and things change. Did they require sharpening more frequently? Certainly. Did they hold an edge as well, compared to more expensive knives? No. But they did what was asked of them and they were reasonably priced for what I got. That's the measure of "good" to me.
Obviously people will disagree, but if we define our terminology up front I can't see that there's an argument. If you look back at my post history you'll see that I have many, many times made this same argument against what I consider to be an attitude of, if not knife snobbery, then knife exclusivity that unfairly dismisses adequate blades out of what I think are unreasonable expectations. This is not a criticism; I'm certainly not taking anyone to task for demanding more. I simply believe that there are really no truly "bad" knives, apart from those that are defective or that are so stylized as to be nonfunctional. There are only knives that are not sufficient value for their price points.
Now, with regard to the subject at hand -- Mantis and its marketing -- I can say from handling every knife in the product line (as of a year ago) that I thought these knives were of reasonable quality for the price. I actually loved the little folding utility knife (the name escapes me) that I carried daily as part of the evaluation, though yes, it was a relatively low-end knife that exhibited quality on par with that sector of the market. They were certainly better than a lot of the Chinese crap flooding the market and an iteration above that benchmark. For the prices asked I thought they were a good buy (though the styling will not be for everyone).
I think what we have here is an over-eager owner who wanted to go from zero to market dominance overnight (something at which I hinted in my reviews, because the company seemed suddenly to spring into being out of nowhere) who didn't understand the forum landscape or the significance of the audience here. I think he's made a terrible mistake in initiating this campaign, and had I read any of the "militia" e-mails I started to get after getting on his mailing list through interacting with him, I'd have sent him an e-mail telling him so. We've seen similar marketing mistakes. Remember the original Hissatsu ads, before the knife was picked up by CRKT, in which the reader was excoriated for not being tactical enough because he or she had not yet bought a Hissatsu? That was a grand miscalculation and the sort of thing this demographic despises. Jared's made a similar misstep here. Time will tell if it's recoverable or not.
This does, however, raise an interesting issue. Should one's like or dislike for a company's marketing and public image affect whether one buys the products? Clearly, for many, that answer is yes. For others, however, it is not. I tend to view inanimate objects as having no provenance. If I like what that product can do or I find it worth owning for whatever pragmatic reason, the attitude or advertising of the producer doesn't really factor into my decision. For example, some people won't own a Chinese-made firearm for political and ideological reasons. Me, I'll gladly own a Chinese AK clone if it means, well, I've got a reliable AK clone. And so on.
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