Sadly, I do have a unibrow. Runs in the family. Between my mother and I, I think we have eight Tweezermans (I want to call them Tweezermen).

We each have a stash, and use them until they need sharpening. When we are each on our last sharp one, we mail the rest back for sharpening. This has gone on for over a decade. Have we spent a bunch on tweezers? Yes. Amortized over a decade as compared to buying new ones (which is what we had to do with lesser brands)? I'm not so sure it doesn't work out in our favor. This most recent time, I sent them my hair cutting shears for sharpening as well.

If Tweezerman had a cult, I'd be in it.

Hi Amy,

I've worked for that type of biz for a number of years. Yes we resharpened stuff as a courtesy to the customer ( though we mostly made new stuff).

The reason it takes so long is because of the way it's processed. First it goes through shipping, then customer service to set it up, then it's up to the production guys. Let's say it takes 5 minutes to resharpened your tweezers, well it's probably still done by hand or if it's done by machine you have to wait until the machine is free and someone sets it up.

But this doesn't happen immediatly. It's the set up that takes so long, and keep in mind when it comes to this stuff everyone is always behind. Machines fail, stuff is made incorrectly, it's not the only thing they do on a machine, etc.

So it's not a money thing, it's just a setup thing. And for a big company like tweezerman to do it in 4-6 weeks is pretty damn good. It's standard for big companies to do that.

Tweezers need sharpening?

And for a big company like tweezerman to do it in 4-6 weeks is pretty damn good. It's standard for big companies to do that. -- Purplepen at February 20, 2013 4:16 PM

This is why I have my current job. I'm a production DBA and have enough development experience to troubleshoot just about any software.

Someone noticed a few years back that support calls for our software could drag out a week to ten days easy for some relatively minor issues. it would pull the development staff off of development and onto support issues. And then the solution wouldn't necessarily fix the issue because of moving day-to-day changes in the customer data from the example data they built the fix on.

So the director over the support desk had my position created. The support data calls landed on my desk. I could do fixes on live data or on samples. I could do it in a day and the dev staff was rarely disturbed. The investment in one decent paying salaried position saved a few $100K in customer satisfaction, dev time, word of mouth credibility, and other intangible benefits.

Another example we just ran into the other day. Our support staff had a call from the customer saying they couldn't use our software on a new computer. So we wanted to access the computers using our remote support software. That was when the support team member was told the two computers were connected via a crossover cable and could not connect to the internet and the other computer at the same time. A crossover cable costs about $7 on Amazon. A simple 4 port switch and 3 cables will be about $20.

That $13 in savings cost more than five hours of downtime for two employees and an unknown amount of time over the years in uploading data to the internet, as legally required by their staff.

So if Tweezerman, or any similar company would make a single position for $40K and buy an extra grinder for $10K they could probably get the turnaround down to a few days, get the production staff out of it and get a lot of customer loyalty.

I'm not saying this is always the answer, but a thing to consider before saying that this is just the way it is.

"I'm not saying this is always the answer, but a thing to consider before saying that this is just the way it is."

It's actually not that simple with physical tweezers or things made of steel.

Machines cost millions of dollars by the way, which is why they probably have more than one use. And then there is material (wheels to grind them), customer service, shipping, and even if you have one guy just grinding all day in a $10,000 grinder he's never going to catch up or be fast enough, because he's hand grinding.

Think of it like this: Imagine you pay a guy 40 k to hand peel oranges all day long...Peeling one orange? Takes no time right? Now imagine the oranges keep coming in and are assigned numbers. So Amy's Orange is 567th, so he has to hand peel 566 oranges before he gets to Amy's orange. But! He misses a day, his hands no longer work, or a bunch of other variables.

Your other choice is to get a mutli million dollar machine simply to peel oranges. However they dont just sell a machine that peels oranges, it also peels bananas, apples, and pomegranates. It just so happens you own a fruit company, so you are not just going to use it to peel oranges because you have to pay a guy to run the machine anyways and you owe money on the machine.

Basically they dont want to promise a customer something they can't fulfill due to physical limitations in the process. Or they dont think it's worth the money to spend it on the service. And personally I've seen alot of big companies laugh in someones face when the service is requested for free. They loose a ton of money, it takes too long, most customers DONT want the service and smaller local companies do it cheaply and quickly.

One last thing to add-I own more expensive tweezers than Tweezerman and they sure as hell don't offer the resharpening service. I believe Revlon, and most other cheap tweezers don't either. The fact that they do it is amazing, like I said most big companies will NOT do it.

Basically they don't want to promise a customer ... most customers DON'T want the service and smaller local companies do it cheaply and quickly. -- Purplepen at February 20, 2013 10:57 PM

As I said PP, it might be worth a consideration not a requirement. For a $17 pair of tweezers it may not be worth it. But if you have a customer that just spent $1K buying a large item a month ago and it goes bad -- remember that anyone can have a blog or presence that is beyond themselves. Just google "cheaper than dirt sucks". I don't have a better example offhand.

Wow, these comments are fascinating -- I love learning about manufacturing and physical industry, and I'm a bit of a techie myself (dating the IT department, actually). But as my fun story contribution -- my aforementioned IT boyfriend's family used to be super broke, so for vacations they'd go on the "free" weekends offered by timeshare companies. They'd have to sit through an hours-long sales pitch, though, so they weren't exactly "free," but to his parents it was worth it for a shoestring getaway!

I have family young members who've done that too... And the truth is, they're not scamming. Those presentations give them serious enthusiasm about owning a place in Vegas (etc.) some day.