I've known people from the Cut Co company. The whole plan was/is to send college kids out selling them door to door. Even Cut Co will tell you this all falls apart after the kids sell their parents, grand parents and maybe a few close family and friends. For most sales drop to about zero in the days that follow but Cut Co has found there are always a few hard charging "salesmen" out there that will do well with the product. The knives aren't bad just over priced. Ethan Becker told me he thought their bread knife was the best one on the market.
Yeah the big bread knife is solid. Plus, as anyone who works with hand tools for a living might be aware, only part of the price is what happens prior to your purchase: R&D/engineering, overhead, production/manufacturing, sales... But that's mostly the extent of what anyone considers when thinking about the cost and value of a purchase... if they even know the difference between the two concepts.
I own a lot of tools and equipment from the major tool trucks you see around, Mac, Matco, Snap-On. A big part of what I happily pay for, when buying from them, is the value of what the company does and after the point of purchase. I can find a wrench that'll do 98% of what the Snap-On one does, and it'll cost a lot less. But *I* have to go do that. As a mechanic, I don't have to even go anywhere to find it. Truck shows up, and there it is. It's made here in the USA, and if it ever breaks, they'll give me a new one. I don't have to fill out a form, or go to the post office; I give it to the rep, I get a new wrench. My time is not free any other time of the day, and I'm happy to pay extra for not having to use my time for that.
Now, for less crucial stuff, I'm fine with something inexpensive, if it's not so cheap as to be unsafe or difficult to use. I try to choose wisely in my battles with my wallet.
Anyway, on to CutCo. My lady's mother bought one, maybe about 30 years back, from what she says, as well as those kitchen shears you can cut a penny in half with. I believe that a close friend was trying to raise money for something, and that she would probably have never bought them, otherwise. Honestly, I'm a bit of a blade snob at this point, but... They're not bad. The shears are really good, actually. The bread knife gets used a few times every week or two. It's not hard for a serrated knife to cut for a long time... But the ones on this bread knife have been sharp for two years now. I realize this isn't exactly impressive, but it is a totally competent blade for bread.
To this day, over a quarter-century later, on top of the years of use, she can redeem even more value from the price she paid on purchase. If either of them dull or break, she'll send them to CutCo and get 'em back in sharp, working, order. If they can't fix or sharpen, they'll send a replacement. She just had both the knife and the shears sharpened a couple summers back. A solid argument could be made that these items were well worth the price. By the way, she doesn't remember how much they were, but she remembered they "were not cheap!"
Personally, I would generally be happier with high-carbon Japanese kitchen cutlery. It has character. I know how to take care of it, and I *enjoy* taking care of it.
I despise pyramid schemes. They're an assault on the poor and the optimistic, taking fully the advantage of human vulnerability to the fallacies of sunk cost and confirmation bias. They dangle a carrot, get you up on that treadmill, and slowly crank it up as they bleed you dry.
Sometimes though, these scam operations actually sell good stuff. A few, from what I've heard, are even known for it. Apparently most people in HerbaLife join it just so they can buy product at the discount rate. Amsoil lubricants, for another example, operate a terrible hellscape of a pyramid-shaped business model, where almost every Amsoil vendor operates at a net loss... But it is a good product. I'd call it the opposite of believing something is good because it is expensive and has a name. It probably is, but these are things best judged on their own merits.
If it's important to the end-user to only buy something one time, they'll soon come to understand that adds to the price. Whether or not price and value line up in a favorable way is different depending on who's making that decision.
