I would love to see statistics on who the buyers of these knives are. For my entire career I always kept in mind Harry Dent’s book “The Great Boom Ahead”. In that book written in 1991,Harry, who is a behavioral economist, showed the direct correlation between the baby boomers and the economy. He called it “the spending wave”. People are predictable when it comes to spending. When you reach your 40’s and through your 50’s you reach your peak of spending. When you look at the “spending wave” compared to the stock market, it’s a direct correlation. It’s also interesting the predictions he made in 1991. He predicted that Harley Davidson would reach a peak in the early 2000’s because the average Harley customer is a middle age white guy going through a midlife crisis. Around here, during that time period, motorcycles were everywhere. Now that the rush is over, not so much. And Harley’s stock has fallen off it’s perch now for many years.kootenay joe wrote:These high prices are due to strong collector interest. With many GEC patterns there are more interested collectors than knives to collect. If knife collecting does not continue to attract new members, in 10 years or so there could be far fewer knife collectors. If this happens the high prices being seen now will decline.
But the converse could happen. GEC is making such outstanding knives that many people new to knives might become enamored and become knife collectors. If this really took off then prices for the most desired patterns and knives with excellent handles would go higher than they are now.
It could go either way. The future is often not what had been expected.
kj
The reason I went into all of that comes back to my first sentence. I wonder if the reason these knives are going for so much has to do w/ the “spending wave”. I just have to wonder how many buyers of these knives are people, mostly men, who now have disposable income and are satisfying their never before affordable urge to collect knives? If that’s what is driving this, then this thing has several more years to run. Problem is when the tap gets turned off, it gets ugly, just look at Harley Davidson.
SSk