A Meh-rathon of Sweet Meh-mories
This is a Caldo Heated Puffer Jacket. You either know what that is, or can jump in the forum to ask other people about it.
Why aren’t we giving you more info? Well, we weren’t sure what to write for the Meh-rathon so we decided to look at some past Meh write-ups for inspiration. (You can find a random one here, if you want.) Unfortunately, all that did was make us nostalgic and maybe a little teary-eyed. And then the boss was all “Where’s the write-ups, writer dude?” and we panicked and… uhh… Please enjoy this classic write-up about an entirely different product! Also, feel free to share in the forum if you find one you liked or forgot about or missed entirely.
For centuries, knife manufacturing was about one thing: Making the most durable, hardest, sharpest knives possible. Blade makers passed techniques down through the generations. Apprentices became masters. Knives got better and better.
These days, the art of knife making is all about wooing Amazon shoppers. Some do so with slicing demonstration videos. Others with nerdy descriptions of the hardness of their steel. The Kai knife people tried to convince online shoppers to buy their knives by making the blades look permanently wet … for some reason.
Why do the blades look wet? Maybe it is the natural outcome of their special steel-forging process. Maybe they want to mess with people the same way someone might glue a quarter to the sidewalk. Or maybe they thought “We need something to make us stand out from the Amazon throng — why not bedewed blades?”
Yet Amazon, in its byzantine algorithm-driven wisdom, somehow swapped the reviews of this knife set with those for a Shun set. Shun, for those who don’t know, is an extremely high-end (read: expensive) brand that makes superlative cutlery, so this Amazon bungle was a boon for Kai — suddenly their middle-of-the-road knives were reviewed as if they were top-of-the-line ones. Boon!
But it sucks for Shun. They spent years creating a brand synonymous with quality, and Amazon screws it all up. Which further proves that the life of the knife-maker is cruel.
It also shows how Amazon has (in our opinion) reached a tipping point of complexity. A given product can have five variations on the same product page, all shipped by different sellers with different ratings, and disconnected from the five other product pages for the same product from different sellers. It’s a mess.
We’re not saying Amazon is stupid — they have achieved some stupendous things — but that they seem to be expanding faster than they can control how their store works. Maybe they should try selling one thing a day; it’s way easier.
In the meantime, knifemongers like Kai will have to weather the vicissitudes of Amazon fortune. They can battle to differentiate themselves. They can take advantage of erroneous reviews for their products. And they can mess with people’s minds by making wet-looking knives for some reason.
