Buttermilk Supply Issue

Shop Knives and stones on ebay
Advertise with us
Kitchen Knife Forums

Help Support Kitchen Knife Forums:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
J

johnpack

Member
Joined
Feb 21, 2017
Messages
10
Reaction score
0
Hello. I joined here to maybe get some help. I found Buttermilk Supply online and worked with Sam to have my knives sharpened. He and his site indicated 24 hour turn around after he received my knives. He received delivery of the knives (via insured tracked USPS shipping) on February 6.

I have yet to receive my knives back.

I've left voicemail, email and even texts. I'm not sure what the story is, but I'm concerned. My payment was processed, however.

I've honestly not sure what to do besides work to have the charge reversed and take legal action against him as he has a set of very expensive knives. Any help or suggestions would be welcome.
 
Quick summary of one thread (order of a new knife from the webstore): Sam was out of town for a family emergency issue for 10 days, seems he just recently returned, and it seems like the order is going through. Hopefully you will get your (sharp) knives back soon.
 
With that said Sam contacted me on Tuesday (4 or 5 days ago) and said he was going to refund my money and set the knife aside with an option for me to purchase it. I've replied to his email 3 times and haven't heard back yet. He hasn't refunded my paypal transaction of $418usd and hasn't sent the knife yet either so I'm not really sure if he's back in business or not.
 
labor of love said:
Well you can open a PayPal investigation which should freeze his account until the dispute is settled.
Click to expand...

When I heard from Sam, he said he would be returning to his office on Friday 2/24. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume I'll hear from him Monday or Tuesday. I have alerted my credit card company to this issue, and if I don't hear from him by the end of this week my attorney says I can file something against him. (no idea what and I really hope that it doesn't come to that.) I'll just be happy to get my knives back - sharpened or not.
 
I'm going to be that guy, I guess.

People on this site are far too forgiving to supporting vendors. A lot of them straight-up suck at communication-- and that's when they're actually in business.

For about a year, Sam at Buttermilk been a ghost. His website is still up and accepts payments, but he does not return calls, e-mails, etc. If you've got a problem to attend to or you're shutting your business down for a while, put a message up on your website. I'm not trying to $hit on just Sam, as other vendors/makers are guilty of this too, but this utter lack of professionalism is borderline condoned by members of this site.

EDIT: I want to add that are actually some phenomenal vendors/makers on this site. It's hard for newcomers and non-members/lurkers like OP (who only joined because he wanted to resolve this problem) to weed the good out from the... not so good.
 
I'll be the other guy. Yes we are fortunate to have some great vendors who have turned this knife stuff into a livelihood by being responsive to customers, offering good products, fair prices and above and beyond customer service. Sam was one of these vendors for most of his tenure here.

But most of our vendors and craftsmen are one deep. If the wheels come off from illness, personal reasons or they just don't want to do it anymore then things go to crap in a hurry. This forum allows and encourages critique of these vendors so that members can make choices about whom they support with their business. This candid openness is one the things I value here,

I don't know what's up with Sam. I have no work with him currently but this is very uncharacteristic of the Sam I have done business with in the past. I will suggest that anyone who has ordered product or services from him in the last six months - year that they should have known things were not good, or would have known if they had done any kind of due diligence.

I completely agree that websites should be updated to reflect current status if things are rough and that lack of communication reflects poorly on the vendor. Any vendor.

I hope that Sam comes through whatever is going on in his life and that he can return to making a living from keeping knife knuts happy. Those that have sent money for product or services should pursue whatever remedy is comfortable to them. Anyone considering ordering should weigh the difficulties expressed here and probably keep their money in their pocket until assurances are in place.
 
Yes, Caveat Emptor and all that. But if a vendor has a working storefront (including updates that show items that are in or out of stock), that takes payments, the obligation is on the vendor to either fulfill the purchase in a timely manner, disable the payment mechanism, or update the webpage somewhere to give buyers a reasonable expectation of if there is going to be a shipping delay. Even for a small operation, we're talking about mere minutes to do any of these things.
 
brooksie967 said:
PayPal refunded my money today. Super upset and would have rather gotten the knife.
Click to expand...

Well, at least you got your money back. I've yet to receive my knives back and Sam isn't returning my emails or calls. Thanks for keeping me posted on your progress. I'll let you know what my lawyer turns up. I'd strongly suggest that no one does future business with this person until this is rectified.
 
johnpack said:
Well, at least you got your money back. I've yet to receive my knives back and Sam isn't returning my emails or calls. Thanks for keeping me posted on your progress. I'll let you know what my lawyer turns up. I'd strongly suggest that no one does future business with this person until this is rectified.
Click to expand...

At what point does a vendor get their privileges revoked on this website? I understand that they pay to be on here, but it's pretty crappy there are multiple supporting vendors on here who have clearly dicked people over and remain.

For any new member I suggest you introduce yourself to the forum and before doing any business with vendors (site approved or not), you message some "established" members of this forum to see what they have to say.

I'm not at all saying I'm one of the "established," but I never have a problem answering somebody's private message. Additionally, most members of this site are friendly and helpful. After all, we all have something in common on this site.
 
mise_en_place said:
At what point does a vendor get their privileges revoked on this website? I understand that they pay to be on here, but it's pretty crappy there are multiple supporting vendors on here who have clearly dicked people over and remain.

For any new member I suggest you introduce yourself to the forum and before doing any business with vendors (site approved or not), you message some "established" members of this forum to see what they have to say.

I'm not at all saying I'm one of the "established," but I never have a problem answering somebody's private message. Additionally, most members of this site are friendly and helpful. After all, we all have something in common on this site.
Click to expand...

I agree. My first post on this forum was about Buttermilk's lack of response to multiple emails and phone calls. I was assured that Sam was a stand up guy (which I'm sure he is as far as the people who responded were concerned ). I had questions about the knife I wanted to purchase and had reservations about sending money with no response. I did a test purchase for a t shirt and didn't receive it and decided not to pull the trigger on a knife. The fact that they are a paid vendor on this site seemed to me to be an endorsement. IMHO, at the piont that multiple members have had poor experiences with no explanation from the vendor, the offending vendor should be suspended from the forum to protect the members. This has been going on for many, many months now.

Of course, anytime I say anything about anything, there is the overwhelming chance I am completely wrong in all aspects.
 
I have a feeling there are some vendor accounts that are here because ongoing issues like this preclude shutting them down without creating bad optics.

I did get a knife from Sam back in early 2016 when he had his sale, all went well at the time. I feel for anyone who is in a position where they have no recourse with an inactive vendor because I'm kinda there myself.
 
I have no horses in this race, but I an trying to look at it from the legal/business prespective. There is contract between this forum owners and a vendor that is most pobably on yearly basis. The wendor pays for certain service and functionality and the forum owners, according to the contract make those services available. Now if the vendor for one reason or another does not reply properly to customers or does not ship payed-for goods, it does not necessarily violate the cotract between the forum and the vendor. So if forum would stop providing the services to the vendor, it would breach the contract and become liable for the breach. It all of course depends on the legal details the knowledge of I do not posses, but I suppose that the vendor would have to break different rules for the forum to be able to terminate or susped the services and not be liable for that.

At the same time I would expect a separate sub-forum of kinds where the memebers would be able to rate, or in some way give feedback to, given vendor and so such a subforum could serve, among others, as a warning when a vendor is going off the track.
 
Matus said:
At the same time I would expect a separate sub-forum of kinds where the memebers would be able to rate, or in some way give feedback to, given vendor and so such a subforum could serve, among others, as a warning when a vendor is going off the track.
Click to expand...

I think all the complaints stacking up into a vendor's own sub-forum function pretty well as a big red flag... probably more obvious than hiding it in a different sub-forum.
For the same reason I don't see much of a point in 'closing these sub-forums down'; it'd close off a pretty visible avenue for customers to signal their problems and warn off others.
 
Jovidah said:
I think all the complaints stacking up into a vendor's own sub-forum function pretty well as a big red flag... probably more obvious than hiding it in a different sub-forum.
For the same reason I don't see much of a point in 'closing these sub-forums down'; it'd close off a pretty visible avenue for customers to signal their problems and warn off others.
Click to expand...

I'm going to disagree. Until recently, nobody had much to say in terms of negative feedback and this sort of negative feedback only starts to show up for catastrophic ****-ups on the vendor/maker's end.

I've dealt with vendors here that while they actually provide a service for the money you give them, they are awful at communication, willfully ignore you for months on end, charge different forum members different pricing per mm (for same style of knife), etc. These kinds of things NEVER show up on sub-forums because it's extremely uncommon and confrontational for a member on this site to open X maker's sub-forum and say: "I loved the knife but later I found out X charged me $.50 more a mm than another person who ordered a knife at the same time. X asked for all my money up front and didn't deliver the knife for 13 months; all the while being terrible at communication."

Vendors like I described above are highly lauded and have plenty of forum fan boys who would step in and say, "Hey, man. This knife thing is a hobby for X, so issues are bound to come up," or "He's had family issues!" I'm commissioning a knife for hundreds of dollars, not a wax candle. And who hasn't had family issues?

Despite the legal implications (of which I think Matus is greatly overestimating, but please, somebody, correct me if I'm wrong), the fact that inactive and some untrustworthy people continue to be "Site Vendors" implies that KKF is giving some sort of sponsorship, approval, or stamp of approval. If I didn't know better from interacting with some excellent vendors/makers on this site, I'd assume the status as a KKF approved vendor means jack $hit. I would also go so far to imagine responsible vendors don't like being associated with the irresponsible because it makes them look bad.

Finally, while Tanner makes a good point about keeping the sub-forums up so people can (hopefully) tie up loose ends with a different vendor, how long does this need to last? If you've got the email of the vendor, they can ignore you on email instead of this forum ;)

Is it laziness that keeps them up? Del said good-bye in November and his sub-forum is still up. The site vendor subs are 3 months and 1 year. Did Del say good-bye months before his vendor sub ended or has nobody taken that down?
 
Despite my long response above, I think the best way to handle this is to open a reviews sub-forum and encourage people to leave honest and open reviews including details about how well they communicate, how much input do they allow, do they stick to their estimated timelines, and not just how the knife turned out.

How many people had issues with Pierre before his subforum blew up? Too many.
 
I happen to see things as going in an overall positive direction. Sure, there are issues occasionally but I see far fewer makers doing the long wait list with large deposits of days past. I look at it more as being fortunate to be a member here where you're pretty much hearing about it as soon as someone drops out of the system...if you'd just stumbled onto Sam's website and tried to buy a knife it would be quite an unpleasant experience and you'd of gotten no warning at all..at least here, people speak up.

As to Pierre, that's a whole other thing.
 
mise_en_place said:
I'm going to disagree. Until recently, nobody had much to say in terms of negative feedback and this sort of negative feedback only starts to show up for catastrophic ****-ups on the vendor/maker's end.

I've dealt with vendors here that while they actually provide a service for the money you give them, they are awful at communication, willfully ignore you for months on end, charge different forum members different pricing per mm (for same style of knife), etc. These kinds of things NEVER show up on sub-forums because it's extremely uncommon and confrontational for a member on this site to open X maker's sub-forum and say: "I loved the knife but later I found out X charged me $.50 more a mm than another person who ordered a knife at the same time. X asked for all my money up front and didn't deliver the knife for 13 months; all the while being terrible at communication."

Vendors like I described above are highly lauded and have plenty of forum fan boys who would step in and say, "Hey, man. This knife thing is a hobby for X, so issues are bound to come up," or "He's had family issues!" I'm commissioning a knife for hundreds of dollars, not a wax candle. And who hasn't had family issues?

Despite the legal implications (of which I think Matus is greatly overestimating, but please, somebody, correct me if I'm wrong), the fact that inactive and some untrustworthy people continue to be "Site Vendors" implies that KKF is giving some sort of sponsorship, approval, or stamp of approval. If I didn't know better from interacting with some excellent vendors/makers on this site, I'd assume the status as a KKF approved vendor means jack $hit. I would also go so far to imagine responsible vendors don't like being associated with the irresponsible because it makes them look bad.
Click to expand...

Fair points. I think at the root it comes down to the complicated and somewhat conflicting relationship between the forum and the vendors. The fact that vendors are in a way paying customers of this forum creates a very weird situation.
Although I think the hesitancy to 'nail people to the cross' also has to do with regular psychology. I don't see an easy way around this cognitive dissonance, even if you created a seperate sub-forum. It results from having more of a personal relationship with the vendors / manufacturers (even by the simple virtue of knowing their name and 'reading their thoughts'). It's contact theory at its best and this is hard to prevent unless you barr vendors from popping up and posting all together. Considering a lot of them ofer 'added value' in sharing their knowledge that doesn't seem like the best way out either.

mise_en_place said:
Despite my long response above, I think the best way to handle this is to open a reviews sub-forum and encourage people to leave honest and open reviews including details about how well they communicate, how much input do they allow, do they stick to their estimated timelines, and not just how the knife turned out.
Click to expand...
Again, though I don't have a strong opinion either way (like Matus I have no beef in any of these fights) I think the same factors that drive people to spread unwarranted positivism, suck up critique and/or otherwise self-censor would still exist even if you turned it into a seperate sub-forum.

But Chinacats makes a fair point. At least here there is some signalling function. If you just roamed the net you'd have nothing to go from at all. BMS simply looks like it's still in business.
 
Hi all. As an update, I got two automated alerts from Sam's website. One to say my money was refunded. And the other to say my order was canceled. No word on if my knives would be returned. It's been a week since I received these auto alerts so I gotta assume that my knives are long gone. Naturally, Sam has not returned any calls, emails or other social media pings. I've turned it over to my lawyer now so it's out of my hands.

I did speak to a person on Facebook that is also hunting down Sam to get back his merchandise. So looks like I'm not alone.

I've filed a complaint with the BBB as well as the FBI dept on fraudulent websites - per Google's suggestion (if anything, his site should be taken down). I've also posted on Yelp to maybe help others avoid my mistake.

Thanks for all of the help and advice from this group. I appreciated all of your time and comments. Have a nice week.
 
John, I am sorry to read all that. Please keep us posted if anything new comes up. I hope you will get your knives back.

In general - for one thing - how comes in this time of internet and instant information on everything, we can not figure out what on earth is going in with Sam.
 
Update: Sam got back to me.... Sent me PayPal money request and shipped my knife for free. That said he mentioned expedited shipping and sent it ground parcel but I have a tracking number and it's in Canada now. He didn't respond to any other emails after that though.
 
That's great! If you happen to get a box that has a bunch of extra Shun knives in it, let me know :laugh:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top