Kitchen Knifes: A Weake Economy Or False Economy?

Cutting, chopping, slicing, dicing and cleaving - a mere glimpse into the everyday responsibilities of the kitchen knife. Around the world, in all continents there is the same universal use for a kitchen knife, and the preparation of food is unlikely to go away any time soon.

The kitchen knife market is totally saturated, but that does not mean that this huge array of choice is a good thing. The likes of CostCo and Walmart in the US, and Tesco and ASDA in the UK produce or import kitchen knives that you can pick up at rock bottom prices; entire knife blocks with eighteen kitchen knives can cost you less that USD$20, and people gladly by them. Then, they buy another set two years later, and another and another.

This is because cheap kitchen knives are a false economy. In this example, a false economy means that people are attracted to buy poor quality knives because they are very affordable; however, this affordability is not real, because the poor quality knives have to be replaced fairly regularly. In their lives, consumers have the option of buying one set of high quality, expensive kitchen knives, or they have the option of buying a new inexpensive set every few years which ultimately turns out to be far more expensive.

Obviously a higher quality kitchen knife is going to be sharper and pointier, but they are very solidly built. The cheaper alternatives can have very week blades that are made out of a single piece of steel. This blade can easily flex when it is put under a small amount of cutting pressure, which means it could easily flex out of position and over a supporting finger - leading to a pretty unpleasant