Sharp Practice

I am normally pretty resistant to YouTube ads. I have so far declined the amazing blowtorch, the special mosquito zapper, an assortment of workout equipment, diet aids and exercise programs, various electronic guitar-like products, and an oven cleaner that apparently dissolves twenty years of grime in a wipe. The form of those ads tells me they are probably a con. The exaggeration is the tell. But one still got past my critical faculties, even with the help of AI to validate its claims. Here is how they got me while I was watching something else on YouTube.

The rope

A man in a boat tries to cut a rope with his knife. He saws at it. Almost nothing. He puts the knife into a machine that measures bluntness and shows the number. He runs the knife a few times through a wooden roller with a magnetic block, measures it again, and the number drops. The rope cuts this time. The roller is a Kimbo. It costs $89.95, apparently currently 70% off. Share your email and you get another 10% off.

I already owned a serviceable three-track ceramic pull-through sharpener. I did not need a new one. After the ad, I wanted a better one. The nerd in me loved the clever design, and the chef in me had been putting up with not-quite-sharp-enough knives for a long time. The possibility that this product worked was what cut through.

The clever real bit

Credit where it is due. The rolling sharpener is a genuinely clever design.

A sharp edge is mostly about consistency. Every stroke should meet the abrasive at the same angle. A whetstone asks your wrist to hold that angle for twenty minutes, which is why most people give up on whetstones. A pull-through cheats by fixing the angle in the slot, but hands a different job back to you: keep the blade exactly vertical while you drag it through. Nobody can. Mine works, sort of.

The rolling design solves the hard job. A magnetic block holds the blade at exactly 15 or 20 degrees while a diamond disc rolls along the edge. The angle stays consistent, so you get a sharper edge, faster and more easily.

I did all eleven of my kitchen knives on the 400 and 1000 grit discs after I bought my new rolling sharpener. They are the sharpest they have been since new, possibly ever. It is not perfect. The 3000 grit disc adds nothing I could detect, small knives are fiddly to keep above the top of the block, and chips are hard to get out. But it is far better than what I had. That matters, because everything that follows is about price and perception, not product.

The less clever pricing

I went to buy one. Under 15 minutes on Amazon got me most of this. The Temu row came later, while researching this piece.

The Billord is, as far as I can tell, the same product. Same wood-grain drum. Same block with the 15 and 20 degree markings in the same place. Same disc profile. I bought it. It arrived in two days and it is outstanding.

I did not bother with AliExpress or Temu. Their delivery is not a guaranteed two days, and I would lose Amazon's certainty on delivery and returns. At $30 I was happy to buy. At $80 I was not. On a $1,000 product, maybe search more. On a $30 product, stop and have a life. I love finding online bargains, and especially cool new tech that works. This was both.

Only afterwards did I find Temu: hundreds of sellers, around $17 a unit if you buy three, as low as $12 if you meet the $50 minimum. That is the current market clearing price. Billord is at roughly double it, but still cheap. Kimbo is roughly five times Temu's price.

The hundreds of sellers are the giveaway. A product sold under hundreds of badges is a commodity. I don't believe Kimbo designed, invented or makes this. Kimbo most likely bought it and put a label on it. I have products like this already: my stick vacuum, mouse pad and even a tablet. The difference is these products were priced at close to the market clearing rate.

There is something wrong with Kimbo's kind of rebadging, and I feel it. To me this feels like a con, and it only works because the people who make Kimbo's product do not sell direct to consumers at their wholesale price. The root cause is a system issue: in our Western market economies it is often more profitable to inflate a product's perceived value than to invest in a better product or a cheaper one.

There is now an established playbook for making this extractive model work, and it centres on how ads attempt to assert and prove value. Kimbo used almost every trick in the book: the live demo, the measurement, the origin story, the customer endorsements, the huge discount off the "normal" price, the limited-time deal, the volume deal, and repeated exposure across platforms. They did not use "but wait, there's more…", mercifully. The endorsements were the one claim I could check, partly.

The review wall

Kimbo's own site shows 4.8 stars from 21,723 reviews. Only 140 are three stars or below: 0.6 percent negative. On ProductReview.com.au, the same product has 323 reviews and 27 percent are negative.

The difference is telling. I am not convinced Kimbo has made 21,000 sales, let alone collected 21,000 reviews. I cannot check their negative reviews, because Kimbo's site will not let me sort by lowest rating. To get to the 41 one-star reviews I would have to scroll past twenty-one thousand others, loaded at 20 a time, so a thousand clicks. I suspect that is the point.

The ProductReview complaints are mostly about delivery, slow replies, and twenty-odd emails a week asking for a review. Some describe the diamond coating wearing through after a couple of knives. A few out of 323 is not a pattern. It could be a bad batch, a counterfeit, or a competitor. My Billord, which I suspect came off the same production line, did eleven knives without issue.

The lie of omission

Kimbo sells itself as Australian. It probably is, because a Kimbo Pty Ltd has an ABN. I can't tell from the website if it is the same company or not. But let's assume some Australian company owns Kimbo the brand and ships knife sharpeners from an Australian warehouse. All of that can be true. The problem is what it nudges you to assume: Australian design, Australian quality control, Australian materials, some value added here. Kimbo never claims any of that, so I am pretty certain it is not the case. If it were, they would have claimed it on their website in writing. What they don't say on the site is "we import a Chinese commodity and put our brand on it." Which I am pretty sure is actually the case, but my evidence is limited (the price table above, and the warehouse ads and hundreds of Temu sellers in Systematic Fuckwittery below). If they are only importers, the lie is in what is left out.

They would have impressed me more if they had said: we tested half a dozen Chinese manufacturers and put our label on the best one. Then I would know what the extra $60 buys. Even that might be generous, because "best" in sourcing often means lowest cost, smallest minimum order and longest payment terms. But it would at least be transparent.

Nobody says third

No one ever advertises "our product came third in independent testing." Disclosure happens when it flatters and stops when it does not. Avis is the rare exception that proves the rule. "We're No. 2. We try harder" worked for decades because second place could be spun into a virtue. Third place cannot, so it is never mentioned. I get why: how bad would you feel if you actually used only the 5th-best washing powder, drove the 38th-ranked car, lived in the 12th-best suburb in the 221st-ranked city in the 28th-best country, and coated yourself in moisturiser that did not make the top 500? Of course, you would want the world's number one something or other to feel better.

You might think certification fixes this. In practice, look at who pays. The Heart Foundation Tick was a licence: companies paid fees to put it on their products, and in 2007 it went on McDonald's meals. When the certified pay the certifier, certification is just exaggeration at a higher price. The Australian Made logo implies Australian inputs, but the legal test is "substantial transformation" here, so it can mean assembled here, and licensees pay to use it. Kimbo was not badged Australian Made but free-rides on the perception anyway.

Even Choice, which buys its test products anonymously and is funded by subscribers, falls short of what it implies. I want comprehensive market research that finds the category winner. What I can get from Choice is a small sample, a weighting of factors that differs from mine, and coarse evaluations. A test of one or two units cannot detect variation between batches, which is exactly how cheap abrasives fail in this category.

I get more from Amazon reviews in volume, though not from the stars. De Langhe, Fernbach and Lichtenstein found in 2016 that average Amazon ratings track brand image and price more than measured quality. The value is in the complaints. One angry review is noise. The same specific failure, described independently by multiple people, is evidence.

Ads as information

Economists have defended advertising for fifty years. Two arguments carry most of the weight. Spoiler alert: I disagree with both.

The first is Lee Benham's 1972 study of eyeglasses: in US states that banned advertising, glasses cost substantially more, because ads drove price competition. I think Benham is a special case. Eyeglasses carry jewellery-level markups, and price advertising adds competition that a Kimbo-style image ad never touches. The 1971 US ban on TV cigarette advertising shows who pays for that competition. Ad spending fell sharply. Eckard (1991) and Gallet (1999) found the firms faced less competition afterwards, which meant fatter margins, and Gallet found the ads had barely moved total demand, only market share. The firms had been spending heavily just to cancel each other out, and passing the cost on in their prices.

The second is Phillip Nelson's 1974 argument that ad spending signals quality: only a good product earns back its ad budget through repeat sales, so a heavily advertised lemon burns money and dies. Here is my logic against it.

1. Without the ad spend, the same product can sell cheaper while the maker keeps the same margin per unit.
2. If the ad drives volume, and volume brings economies of scale, then the ad is driving purchase unrelated to the product's intrinsic value or quality.
3. As long as the ad drives a higher total margin, it is rational for the maker to advertise, even though that raises the price for the consumer.
4. Ads as information only works if the heavily advertised lemon is punished when widespread use exposes it. Outside special cases, I do not find that credible.

On point 4, some research is on my side. Caves and Greene tested Nelson's idea in 1996 against Consumer Reports quality scores across many categories. Ad spending was a weak predictor of quality. And my sharpener started out as a one-off purchase. There is no repeat sale to punish anyone.

The honest concession: the Kimbo ad did carry information. It told me the category existed and did a better job than my incumbent product. I used that information and I bought. Kimbo just did not get the sale.

The Fuckwittery

So here is what I believe Kimbo's owners actually do. They run an Australian company that imports a Chinese product. They advertise their product heavily online. They want me to pay $60 more than Billord, and roughly five times the Temu price, for nothing different except the name they put on it. I could be wrong.

Kimbo does add some value. I probably can't buy a single unit direct from their Chinese manufacturer, and Kimbo makes that possible here. But hundreds of sellers on Amazon, Temu and AliExpress already do the same. Making a market in an oversupplied commodity is worth a few dollars, not a markup of four times the market price. The rest is merely perceived value: a video of a man in a boat with a sharpness machine, a 4.8 from 21,723 reviews you cannot sort on their website, and the word Australian potentially doing work it never quite claims. That is what nearly every YouTube advertiser I see does. The product is incidental. The exaggerated perception of its value takes primacy.

But follow the money one step further. I could buy a Billord on Amazon and resell it at Kimbo's price for about $60 a unit, less fees and delivery. I would sell none unless I also bought the ads. That is where much of Kimbo's markup most likely goes. Paying YouTube, social media and mobile games to get an ad clicked is expensive, and after that spend Kimbo's total margin may well be slim. The only certain winner is the ad platform. It gets paid whether Kimbo makes the sale or Billord does.

After the YouTube ad, Kimbo found me again on my phone. My Candy Crush ads, labelled as served by Meta, are now almost wall-to-wall Kimbo. Somehow, because I watched something on Google's YouTube on my PC, I am now being hammered on a different device, in a different app, by a different company. That seems a bit conspiratorial, and both Google and Meta are monsters of scale. The phone Kimbo ads no longer show the sharpener. They show a warehouse stacked with Kimbo boxes and a story about clearing stock before a rebrand. That is a standard urgency line. It may even be true. Either way, the new ad is selling scarcity, not sharper knives. Possibly Kimbo are split testing which extraction works better.

Was I Sheeple?

Partly. I did not really need another sharpener. The ad found a want I had not acted on and turned it into a purchase, on someone who prides himself on not falling for ads.

Then I compounded it. Sarah said they would make great Christmas presents, so I bought four more from Amazon, the $30 kits without the pointless 3000 disc. Researching this piece, I found Temu at half the price, still in time for Christmas. Doh!

In my defence, Temu carries more risk than Amazon, $30 is nothing as gifts go, and the tool genuinely is good. I would give one to anyone who cooks. But five sharpeners was not a considered response to a need. It was an emotionally invested response to an ad. Writing this, I am now feeling quite sheepish, if not Sheeple-ish.

The lie on top

Step back from this specific example and the pattern is everywhere. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have the evidence that ads mostly work by keeping a badge front of mind, not by persuading anyone. Fine, as far as it goes. A new category, like the rolling sharpener, is real information. But that is not what most ads are for. Most ads are availability marketing with a lie on top: a claim of value the product does not have.

That lie needs opacity to survive. If I could see that the Kimbo and the Billord come off the same line, the extra $60 would evaporate. Ads make the badge vivid and the supply chain invisible. Rebadging, proprietary part numbers and "contact us for pricing" do the same job without an ad at all. Opacity is the mechanism. Ads are its loudest tool.

What opacity protects is perceived value, and it can more than double the price. This is not just my anecdote. Bronnenberg, Dubé, Gentzkow and Shapiro (2015) found that pharmacists buy store-brand headache pills far more often than everyone else. Same active ingredient, lower price. The more you know, the less you pay for the badge.

The cost does not stop at the buyer. Every ANZ ad I am tortured with, currently the Falcon on repeat, is paid for by their existing customers. The customers who never switch pay higher fees to fund the hunt for new customers. The loyal pay for the chase, but the chase via Falcon is not likely to work on me. Because I think the banks all offer the same security, and it more or less works. So why switch? Certainly not for the Falcon. I just find it irritating. But like the banks, firms in every market advertise just to stay in consideration.

The result is our lives are saturated with ads, every one of them urging us to spend, and all an invitation to make a mistake. Some of those mistakes are overpaying. Many are overconsumption, like my five sharpeners. Still feeling a bit sheepish, by the way.

I find it repulsive that we accept this as normal. And I find Kimbo's owners culpable either way. The market-making is fine. Either they are lying or they are just trying to take the piss and overcharge. To me the immorality is in what they charge for it, and how. An exaggerated ad and a lie of omission are the tools for getting $60 extra for a few dollars of service. Aiming for that is immoral, even if it fails. And if most of the markup ends up with YouTube, Meta and the other platforms, then the platforms are the real extractors, and Kimbo's owners are just stupid: carrying the stock and the risk so that someone else can make the money. It is also a poor business to start with. Hundreds of rebadgers already supply this market. If Kimbo's owners wanted a real margin, they could have created a new category instead of oversupplying this one with a bigger lie.

Systematic Fuckwittery

The sharpener is small. The system it exposes is not. Extraction through perceived value is not a corner of the economy. It is a very high proportion of it. Global ad spend is around a trillion US dollars a year, about one percent of world GDP, and that is the only part anyone measures. Over it sits the badge premium on nearly everything we buy, the opacity premium on everything sourced through a middleman, and the loyalty tax on every customer who never switches. GDP records all of it as output. Nobody publishes the total. My suspicion is that it is somewhere between a quarter and a half of what we spend. If I am even close, a large share of what we call economic growth is the price of being lied to, mostly by omission. Every one of these lies is Fuckwittery, specifically deployed to reduce buyer agency.

I am not upset that one company tried to overcharge me for a sharpener, but that the overcharge is the standard business model of the economy we live in. We all basically know this. We permit it anyway.

Kimbo, at least, paid for its overreach. They did one thing right: they made me want the product enough to buy it. Just not from them. They lost the sale partly because the ad's techniques made me suspicious, and mostly because the price confirmed it. They were too greedy. Or perhaps they had no room on price, given what the ad platforms take from them. The suspicion sent me researching, and Prime convenience and certainty took the sale Kimbo had paid to create. My wife Sarah pointed out it would be rational if Kimbo owned Billord too: hope for $89 but still catch buyers like me with a cheap second badge. Clever, and still extractive. And probably not the reality. The warehouse ads on my phone showed ranks of Kimbo boxes and no Billord. Further, hundreds of Temu sellers suggest this product is easy to buy and resell. Kimbo is probably one rebadger among many, paying to grow a category for all of them. Fuckwittery for them and me.

What interests me most is the research. With an AI helping with searching, I went from knowing nothing about rolling sharpeners to understanding the trade-offs and finding the cheaper badge. A few years ago that was an afternoon, and most people would not have bothered. Today it was less than 15 minutes. Extraction that depends on the buyer not knowing has a shorter half-life now.

The trust does not vanish, though. It moves. I trusted the AI's analysis more than Kimbo's ad, and some of that analysis was judgement, not measurement. Claude, I am watching you too!