Final Point
Becoming Street Smart In Your Sword Shopping

by Adrian Ko

There once was a man named "John" who was in the market for a sports car.

When the color brochures came in the mail, John immediately tossed aside the usual junk mail, personal mail, and important overdue-warning bills and allowed his eyes to lavish upon the rich colorful photographs of the newly available sports cars. Each muscle car was a monument to visual decadence - bright fire-red gloss finishes with larger-than-life wheels, leather sports-car seats oozing with sexuality. Cars radiating with pure power to whomever possessed it.

Without hesitation or further reading, John was off to the dealership, ready to spend top-dollar on his new plaything. Down at the local dealership, the salesperson's teeth gleamed with a preternatural brightness as if he had discovered earlier that chrome polish were good for his dentalwork.

John was guided from car to car. His host delivered a cacophony of exciting sales pitch, having sized John up and determining what would appeal most to the young professional, and thus urging John to sit in, test-ride, and feel himself as part of each car he perused.

Finally one "felt" right. "Oh, this is you! Totally you!" cried the salesperson. John nodded approvingly with a wide and proud smile, knowing subconsciously that if he hadn't, one might question his fashion sense or even his intelligence. Of course, while nodding, he knew the right thing to do was to ask the usual questions. But unfortunately for John, he was merely a driver and did not know a spark plug from a cigarette lighter. Nor had he studied consumer reports magazines, so John wasn't making an informed decision. Nor did John understand the finer points of cars and their intrinsics to know which was better or not, let alone determine whether some of the more incredible claims of the salesperson about the car were even true.

As quickly as the ballpoint pen's ink dried on the dotted line, John drove home in his new red baby. For a while, John drove in his V8. The sports car elevated him immediately from "nerd" status to "stud". Those who would typically pull in front of him prior would now be in reverential fear of this gleaming red streak of death driving down the highway.

However, after a while, something strange started happening to the engine. The air conditioning started smelling funny. Either too cold or too hot, never just right. The suspension felt oversensitive to every speck on the road. And, to make things worse, the car really wasn't the babe-magnet to the girls of John's dreams. In more or less ways, the car failed to live up to what the advertising brochures and the salesperson had claimed.

Now, was it John's fault? Should John have read the consumer reports? Might he have familiaraized himself more about cars so as to not purchase a lemon? And what about all that cool-sounding sales-pitch? Was the brochure outright falsely advertising, or was it correct only from a certain perspective such that the consumer would be guilty for imagining the wrong thing? Or should it be up to the manufacturer - or sales brochure - or even sales person to prove these claims?

Sometimes for the newcomers to swords, the wide variety of swords on the market can be most confusing. Each will extol their products with virtues, means of manufacture, touting "the highest quality" and being made from "the finest materials". Because people are more likely to believe a thing if it is written, this puts the beginning collector at risk of various sources of seemingly authoratative and correct information. Different sources have different standards, definitions and expecatations of quality.

What will you do? Will you drop top dollar like John and purchase what seems great in appearance and sales pitch - to find later that the product failed to live up to its claims? Will you accept as fact all that the sales literature claims?

What it boils down to is this: should the consumer be placed in the position where he or she has to prove the information claimed by the sales literature? Should the sales literature be more concise in its claims such that it is not a matter of interpretation? Should the sword shopper expect more and be more informed?

Whose responsibility is it to separate fiction from reality when a new collector is ready to make a purchase?

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. " - Tom Clancy

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