This is not an announcement about changes that are coming, but a summation of changes that have slowly occurred over time and then punctuated by a bad experience. Let’s get into the bad experience first and then policy changes second.

The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back

I have an Instagram page that I have a love hate relationship with, though as I write that I struggle to think of what I love about it. I get solicitations on a regular basis from companies that want to have me review products for them. I send them a quick note about my review policies and most go away. The ecology of product reviews right now is mega toxic. The ones that do make it through, often send stuff to me for review and the normal stuff happens—I get it, I take pictures of it, and I carry and use it for a while and then write a review. Not complicated. But the Trump tariffs, like they are doing with the entire economy, wrecked this process. A company based in China asked me to review stuff. It wasn’t stuff I would have sought out, they are products below the market segment that I think my readers would want to see, but I agreed. I perused their catalog and found a few items that were slightly closer to the specs of stuff I care about and they agreed to send them to me. To be clear, I could have just bought this stuff on Amazon if I really wanted to take a look at, but they were a new-ish brand so I thought I would take a chance. Then I got a bill from UPS. It basically said that the products were on their way and that I would have to pay $34.20 to receive them. All told, I think the knives I was looking at would have cost something like $42 together on Amazon. I contacted the company and they refused to help, so I rejected the items for review and they went back to China. Then I got the bill again. I called UPS to dispute the bill and got nowhere. I sat on hold for a total of 2 hours and 14 minutes over two calls. I spent hours on their website. I even went to a UPS Store. No help at all. As a funny aside, I went to the UPS store in the morning. There was a line of people behind me and I explained to the guy at the cash register what happened. He told me: “This store is not part of UPS.” I then said: “That’s surprising, given that it is called THE UPS Store.” Everyone in line agreed. Anyway, suffice to say I had to pay the bill or incur late charges of 9.9% a month. It was not worth the hassle.

But it also means that going forward, this site will be run differently. As a side hustle I don’t have the time or money to pay for shipping bills for things I didn’t receive. I am not going to take or solicit review samples anymore. If a company that I have a long term relationship reaches out, I may make an exception, but I am not interested in dealing with tariff-related bullshit anymore. The guy at the UPS Store told me that there were approximately 110 million contested fees in the month of September so the system was overloaded. So the next time some idiot tells you that we don’t pay tariffs remind them that we do.

Changes

First, I am not doing sponsorships or advertisers anymore. Frankly, when I was doing that it was something that always nagged at me. It’s hard to avoid influence when someone is paying you. So I have slowly gone the way of Consumer Reports—this is all self-funded. I do not plan on changing that, though, I reserve the right to do a Patreon.

Second, I am not soliciting for review samples. If you want to send me something reach out. I am happy to look at things. But there are three conditions: 1) the review sample will not be returned; 2) the company providing the product will see the review when it is posted; and 3) the company sending the items will prepay shipping. I made this change because I found myself babying gear so that I could return it without too much damage. The result was gear that didn’t get pushed the way I wanted to push it. There was one instance in which I did not baby something and it led to the review sample being a giveaway (remember that Ben?). But the end result there was a review where I felt like I had a true user’s perspective on the knife. And that, as opposed to pristine review samples, is more important.

Of course, this does present another ethical issue—can the review sample be seen as a bribe? I am sure it could. But I hope that I have done this long enough to earn some leeway here. If I don’t really use it and return it, I don’t have as good a data as I could otherwise. But keeping it could be seen as a source of bias. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. The reality is, either way is problematic and my hope is this solution strikes a better balance between good information and potential bias.

This leads into my third point—most of the gear is purchased out of my own pocket. I do some freelance gear writing and that pays for a large part of the review samples. The site also has affiliate links to Amazon and that pays for review samples. Finally, I do sell items from my personal collection via my IG page or local knife stores, and that generates review samples. The hope is that with kicking in a little cash from the freelance work and carefully managing review samples, I can keep the site “unfunded” and review and write whatever I want.

This last point means that the giveaways for Fisher House which I used to do don’t happen. I hope to build up enough really high end stuff to eventually run one, but the $40 knives that use to be prizes are not real motivators for donations and can be recycled for new review samples.

All of this has happened in large part because I am too busy to do what I used to with advertisers, returning dozens of review samples, and the like. In the end, after about seven years I realized that the advertisers were just paying for shipping to return almost pristine review samples and that seemed nutty. It was a lot of work and quite frankly a killer on my taxes. Everything is simpler now.

If you have problems with the changes, post below. I am always thinking about how to do this better and suggestions are definitely critical to doing that.