If you’ve ever bought something from an online store, you may have noticed the term MAP in fine print somewhere. Standing for Minimum Advertised Pricing, MAP plays a pretty big role in how much you pay for things — whether it’s knives, water canteens, or televisions.
Because we are a knife store, we thought we’d look at the pros and cons of MAP policies and how they affect you.
What is Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP)?
We’ll start with the basic definition: MAP is a policy that sets the lowest possible price you can advertise something. For online stores, this means that the prices displayed must be at or above the amount established by the manufacturer.
To be clear, MAP only deals with the minimum advertised price, not necessarily how much the item can actually be sold for. So even at online stores, you can buy items conforming to MAP at cheaper prices. More on that later though.
Another thing to clarify is that not all manufacturers have MAP policies. Only a few actually have the policies and I think even fewer really enforce the policies. We’ll go into detail later but knife brands like Schrade, Case, and KA-BAR don’t have MAP policies while others like Benchmade, Spyderco, and Hogue do.
What is Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)?
You’ve likely seen MSRP next to prices as well. This is the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price or what price the manufacturer thinks the item should be sold at. This is just a general guideline and you’ll often see the street price significantly lower on these items (especially if they don’t have a MAP policy).
Why Does MAP Exist?
There are often raging debates about the benefits and drawbacks of MAP policies on BladeForums.
For the consumer, MAP can feel like a greedy money grab from manufacturers who are trying to keep prices high. I understand where that’s coming from too. MAP can prevent consumers from getting deals on their products and it prevents stores with the means to sell at lower margins.
Just because nothing is getting done in Washington D.C. doesn’t mean nothing ever gets done in politics.
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed a bill into law yesterday that repeals the state’s switchblade and gravity knife ban thanks to some great work from Knife Rights.
The repeal essentially removes the language related to switchblades and gravity knives from the codes defining dangerous or illegal weapons.
It completely removes the following two passages from Title 18. Criminal Code, Article 12. Offenses Relating to Firearms and Weapons, Part 1. Firearms and Weapons – General:
(e) “Gravity knife” means any knife that has a blade released from the handle or sheath thereof by the force of gravity or the application of centrifugal force.
…
(j) “Switchblade knife” means any knife, the blade of which opens automatically by hand pressure applied to a button, spring, or other device in its handle.
It also eliminates gravity and switchblade knives from the section on possessing a dangerous or illegal weapon.
On Discovery Channel’s show “Naked and Afraid,” survivalist EJ “Skullcrusher” Snyder survived in the wilderness (without any clothes, of course) on nothing but his (and his partner’s) wit. He did this in two intense stints on the show: one on the plains of Tanzania’s Serengeti and another in the Amazonian rainforest.
Snyder is more than just a dude on a reality show; he trained in the Army Survival School and became obsessed with all aspects of survival. Now, the Gulf War veteran has teamed up with TOPS Knives to bring Skullcrusher’s X-Treme Blade (SXB).
“Skullcrusher’s Xtreme Blade” (SXB) was designed for the Warrior Survivalist to aid in their survival not only in the wild, but on the battlefield as well. Xtreme Situations require an Xtreme Blade, and the SXB meets that demand and then some! Why play in the wild when you can DOMINATE it!!!
Yeah, buddy! As you can tell from the description (and several exclamation points), TOPS is pretty enthusiastic about this knife. It’s not unwarranted, though. The knife looks thoroughly badass.
Whether you’re out in the wilderness with only a few pieces of gear or can’t find a sharp knife to save your life, a knife sharpener isn’t always there when you need it the most. Fortunately, knowing the basics of how to sharpen a knife and using a little quick thinking and ingenuity, you can use a variety of household tools to sharpen your knives.
Before we delve into things, we must make it clear what we’re talking about when we say sharpening. The general term for “sharpen” is to give something a keen edge. The knife term for “sharpen” is a bit more specific. It means making a knife sharp by actually removing metal from the blade to form an edge.
Not all of these objects will sharpen a knife in the truest sense of the word like a traditional knife sharpener. Some of them will merely hone or strop the edge. While honing and stropping will indeed sharpen a knife by realigning an edge, it’s not what knife experts typically deem as sharpen.
With all that being said, here are 10 everyday items you can use to sharpen your knife.
Coffee Mug
We’ll start off with something that actually sharpens a knife by removing material from the blade. Ceramic coffee cups are readily available in most houses. Simply turn the mug upside down, search for the raw part of the cup (which is the rougher part of the bottom that prevents the cup from sliding around), and run the knife across the mug until you get your desired edge.
If it’s working well, you’ll see some discoloration on the mug, which indicates the ceramic is removing steel and sharpening the blade.
Leather Belt
Although stropping does not technically sharpen a blade, it does make a blade keener by realigning the edge. A leather belt, which is something you might be wearing right now, is a quick and easy item for stropping a blade. In fact, many professionals use leather straps for stropping.
As someone who handles razor-sharp knives on a day-to-day basis, I’ve been cut on the rare occasion (nothing seriously mind you), so when the founder of NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves reached out for a review, I was intrigued.
They sent me three pairs to try out and here’s what I thought.
Purpose of Cut-resistant Gloves
If you’re a casual knife user, you might be wondering why anyone would need cut-resistant gloves. I thought the same until I met my wife. She’s a very competent and dexterous person, but when it comes to knives and food preparation, she’s a mess.
It started when she cut herself with a peeler a few times and grew worse after she sliced her finger chopping a sweet potato. Since then, she refuses to peel anything for fear of cutting herself. Her confidence is shot.
The NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves are the perfect solution for people like her. These gloves allow her to slice, dice, and peel without the fear of mixing blood and gore in with her famous homemade chili.
Aside from the typical use of holding items while cutting to increase confidence, NoCry Gloves also assist in a few other tasks. The folks at NoCry let me know that a large majority (around 80%) of people who bought the gloves use them in the kitchen. Ideal kitchen use for cut-resistant gloves is peeling, dicing, shucking oysters, grating cheese, or trying to cut a whole watermelon in 30 seconds or less.
Although I don’t have a mandoline slicer, many of the reviews on Amazon say that the gloves can also save a trip to the hospital.
The other 20% of users for these gloves are hunters and fishers. When you’re dealing with sharp knives in wet and slippery environments (filleting a carp or skinning a white-tailed deer), your hands become prone to slippage.
Initial Reaction to the NoCry Gloves
Enough background—let’s dive right in. The gloves arrived in a nondescript, resealable zippered plastic bag. Packed with the gloves were a proof-of-purchase slip and a print-out of some general instructions/care tips. You can tell NoCry is a fairly small operation from the packaging, and that’s not a bad thing.
We’ve entered the bizarre and convenient era of online buying. Thanks to companies like Amazon and Knife Depot, I get packages sent to my doorstep almost every day. Whether by a preprogramming from childhood or a general excitement, I simply can’t wait to tear open the box to see my new prize, even if it’s just a nonstick cake pan.
In my rush to open the box, my knife is what takes the most abuse. Whether because I’m impatient (or my wife is doing the opening), my knives always end up with a pile of tape gunk that doesn’t come off in warm water.
So what’s a man to do?
We’ve got that answer for you below.
Method 1: WD-40
Even though tape residue seems to be embedded on a blade, it’s actually fairly easy to remove. You have a number of options to take them off, but we’ll show you two different ways to remove the residue and the pros/cons. The first method we’re going with is the WD-40 way.
When I was a young kid in elementary school, I read Gary Paulsen’s wilderness novel called Hatchet. The story follows the survival efforts of a 13-year-old who crash lands in the middle of the woods, carrying nothing but his hatchet. From that point on, the hatchet became the coolest tool on the planet in my young eyes.
It’s almost two decades later now, but I still hold the hatchet in high regards because of its overall usefulness and feel. The weight of a good hatchet in your hand is unmatched.
In an effort to make the hatchet more accessible to newbies and experts alike, I’ve assembled the five best hatchets found at Knife Depot. If you have any you’d like to add to the list, feel free to let me know in the comments.
SOG Tactical Tomahawk
For those who don’t know, a hatchet is essentially a small axe that you can use with one hand. The term itself is not mutually exclusive, meaning certain axes and tomahawks can be considered hatchets. The first hatchet on the list is the SOG Tactical Tomahawk.
This is the first of a two-part series with survival expert Creek Stewart. Tomorrow, Creek will be sharing his tips on picking out the perfect survival knife. We’ll also be giving away a BlackBird SK5 — Creek’s primary survival knife — to one lucky reader along with two copies of his book. Scroll to the bottom of the article to learn how to enter.
“I like to live what I preach,” said 36-year-old survival instructor Creek Stewart across a cafeteria table at the Cobb Galleria during the 2013 Blade Show. “I don’t just put survival instructor on my resume.”
A few minutes of conversation with Stewart, who founded and operates Willow Haven Outdoor survival school in Indiana, quells any doubts about his survival chops.
The former Boy Scout turned survival guru and bestselling author rarely goes anywhere without his “Get Home Bag,” a pack full of items ranging from energy bars to a Leatherman that ensures he’ll get home safely if disaster strikes.
At the Blade Show, he was wearing a BlackBird SK5 in a leather sheath on his hip and also had a Leatherman and a Spyderco knife in tow.
But what makes Stewart stand out from the pack isn’t his gear, but his survival philosophy. It’s a blended approach, which he calls “prima-modern,” that utilizes both modern tools and primal survival skills to meet the four core basic needs: shelter, water, fire and food.
A Passion for the Outdoors
An Eagle Scout at 14, Stewart grew up on a farm and developed a strong appreciation for both nature and self-reliance skills at an early age. When he was in college, he wrote and self-published a guide on survival that he sold to the Boy Scouts. He began teaching survival courses at 21, but without a full time facility was limited to mostly one day courses in his area.
Then about 4 years ago, he purchased Willow Haven Outdoor, a 21-acre survival school replete with a 10,000 square foot lodge. Stewart now hosts 1-day and 3-day courses every year from May until November and said he serves a huge range of attendees, from 10-year-olds to 80-year-olds. The approach at Willow Haven is somewhere in the middle in terms of intensity and Stewart said he’s developing a niche for instructing families.
“There’s one extreme where people come to a survival course and expect to strip down to a leather thong and only take their knife into the woods with them for seven days and starve, then there’s the classroom survival stuff — we’re perfectly in the middle,” he said.
In a typical class, students will receive hands on instruction to learn between three to five survival skills from each of the core four survival areas.
In addition to teaching, Stewart has also taken his survival skills to the literary world. He recently published the Unofficial Hunger Games Wilderness Survival Guide, which provides step-by-step instructions on how to perform many of the survival skills utilized by characters in the “Hunger Games.”
Update: A few people have asked if they can see emails between Knife Depot and Google Adwords staff. The short answer is yes, if it’s something you’re interested in writing about, then just email me at [email protected]. I also added an excerpt lower in the post, in which a member of the Adwords staff reveals his own disgust at the “double standard” Google is applying to big brands.
For seven years, Knife Depot has been selling top-quality blades over the Internet to the jubilation of knife lovers everywhere. And for the last two years, we’ve been writing about knives and knife culture on The Cutting Edge.
However, recently, something has threatened our ability to promulgate our large selection of knives to the legions of blade lovers across the world: Google has shut down our AdWords Account.
AdWords, if you’re not hip to the Internet jive, is a Google advertising program that allows companies to place text-based ads next to specified search queries. To the user, it looks like this:
Up until late February of this year, Knife Depot had generated a good slice of its revenue from Google AdWords. We’d also been careful to not ever violate Google’s Adwords weapons policy, which prohibits “the promotion of knives, such as butterfly knives, (balisongs) and switchblades.”
For this reason, we were shocked when last month Google told us they would be terminating our AdWords account unless we removed all of our “assisted opening knives,” which are legal, hugely popular across the U.S, and not prohibited in Google’s policy. Assisted opening knives, if you’re not aware, differ from switchblades by the fact that pressure must be applied for them to be opened.
Here’s a more in-depth explanation.
After some deep thinking, we decided that serving our customer base, who legally buy large amounts of assisted-opening knives, was more important than continuing to advertise with Google. For this reason, we decided to not remove the knives and forgo our Google Adwords account
Of course, we expected that our fellow knife vendors would be subjected to the same anti-knife policies, and be forced to make the same decision of whether or not to advertise with Google or sell assisted-opening knives.
We were wrong.
While Google shut down the AdWords account of a few other Internet knife vendors, it has continued to allow large brands such as Walmart, Amazon and Bass Pro Shops to sell assisted-opening knives and advertise on Google Adwords.
Just check out the images below from Amazon.com and Walmart.
Yes, the world is unfair. And yes, we have contacted Google on numerous occasions about this blatant favoritism toward big brands and despite assuring us that they would rectify it, they haven’t. In fact, even their own staff was sickened by the hypocrisy, as you can see from this February 28th email excerpt from a Google employee.
“I am still waiting on an answer to my reply where I asked for a universal enforcement of the policy OR we allow knife depot back online. I replied and said, I refuse to tell knife-depot they need to remove a product category that 7 other competitors are advertising & selling the same products. I then named each domain, called out the double standard, and requested that they state the clear differences that allows these competitors to serve & knife depot to be suspended. Still waiting on this reply.“
So for these reasons, we wanted to let you guys, loyal Cutting Edge readers and Knife Depot fans, know that you might not be seeing Knife Depot ads peppered across the Internet. However, rest assured that it’s not because we’ve softened our commitment to build the world’s most badass knife store, not even one bit.
It’s just because The Man tried to put his foot on our throat and say, “Hey, stop selling those badass assisted-opening blades,” and we refused, so The Man shut down our ads.
However, what the Man didn’t realize is that though he might be able to shut down our ads, he’ll never crush the desire of knife-loving men and women across the country to own perfectly legal and totally badass spring-assisted blades. And he’ll never stop us from selling them.
We appreciate you being a part of the Knife Depot family and we hope, despite our absence from Google Adwords, you continue to buy knives on our site. Oh, what’s that, you want me to end this blog post with a razor-sharp video of our top-selling assisted-opening knife?
This is the third installment of The Cutting Edge’s new article series: Hot Kitchens, Hot Knives! Cooks and foodies almost love geeking out about their knives as much as they love food (and at times, even moreso!), so we’ll be sitting down with chefs, kitchen crews, and bloggers all across the world to ask them about their knife collections and the culinary workhorses that they know and love. Check out this series every Tuesday if you want to find out what kind of heat the guys and gals in the kitchen are packing in their knife rolls.
Luisa Weiss is the brilliant mind behind The Wednesday Chef, a gorgeously shot and executed culinary blog. It’s been featured as one of Gourmet magazine’s favorite food blogs as well as on The Sunday Times’ list of the 50 best food blogs in the world. The blog chronicles Weiss’s adventures cooking along with recipes she’s hand-picked from the internet, books, and newspapers, as well as her struggles with finding just the right meals for her little son, Hugo. She’s also penned a sensational recipe-filled memoir called My Berlin Kitchen. No matter what the subject, she handles it all with a sense of humor that we really appreciate.
Naturally, we figured she’d have a lot to say about her knife collection. More on that after the jump! Continue reading
