New Wenger store opens: It's not about the knives anymore

Wenger, one of the two producers of the venerable Swiss Amy Knife,  opened its first United States store on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder yesterday.  Here follows a review from a committed knife nut and hopeless gear head.

This store, and by extension Wenger, is not about the knives anymore.  When a visitor steps in the door, there are watches on the right and shoes on the left. This shouldn't come as a surprise: the Wenger website says that the store "was conceived and managed by Wenger Footwear licensee Established Brands International."

A Swiss Army shoe shore?  The watch display has a replica of the original Wenger knife, and there's one in a window built into a bench, and the rest of the room has luggage and day packs, with an attractive pseudo-old mural painted on the brick.

To see the knives, you advance into the second room in the store.  There, mounted on the wall and brilliantly lit, are the knives.

I haven't seen so many Swiss Army Knives since visiting the Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Tennessee, so it was a good chance to look at them up close.  If I were going to buy one, it would be the Ranger 151, which sells for $38.95.  A salesman got one out of a box and handed it to me.

This knife has none of the famous gizmos that characterize Swiss Army Knives. It has just one blade, one that can be opened with one hand by sticking one's thumb into the hole and flicking the blade out.  It opened smoothly enough, but when I turned my attention to the business end, I saw why I will never buy a Swiss Army Knife.

The basic function of a knife is cutting things.  To do this, the blade has to be sharp, and this one wasn't.  The metal on the thinnest part of the blade was rolled over--you could feel it on the other side--a sign of poor workmanship.  I ran the fleshy part of my thumb along the blade and was not cut at all.  Had I done that with a Spyderco Delica, I would have been reaching for a Band-Aid or headed for the emergency room.

And there's the rub (so to speak).  Swiss Army Knives, in my experience, have never been very sharp and will not hold a good edge even if you try to sharpen them.  For most people, that is fine.  They use the knives to open envelopes or cut string or other mundane tasks.  This won't work for me.  I want a knife so sharp it will cut through rope in one slice or delicately cut tomatoes or onions in the backcountry.

The same goes for the gizmos.  They are inventive and fun to manipulate, but they just don't work that well.  Try to fix something with a wrench on a Swiss Army Knife.  If you really need a tool, get a Leatherman or something of that ilk.  In the backcountry, I carry a Leatherman Wave, an earlier version of the one pictured here:

The store did have a hilarious display containing all the Swiss Army implements on one knife:

There wasn't much to the rest of the place.  Four sleeping bags and two tents were displayed, more to create atmosphere, it seems, to get people to feel good about buying rugged watches and knives with all manner of survival tools and--most important--some badass sneakers.  Thus equipped, they can settle in at home wearing  zip-off pants and watch an episode of "Lost."