Were you victimized by Cutco? Tell us about your experience.
Have you bought or sold knives from Cutco but now a customer service delay has you worried it might all have been a pyramid scheme? If so, you aren’t alone. Maybe your issue is with a billing problem, or you’ve tried customer service but to no avail, so you started searching for answers online and that only left you uncertain about how good or bad the company really is.
Cutco was established in 1949 and it was at the time the biggest manufacturer of kitchen cutlery throughout the United States. The Cutco line includes things like kitchen knives, utensils, flatware, and cookware. They have over 600 employees who work in the administrative headquarters and factory in New York and the products are sold through in-home demonstrations, trade events, and at retail locations.
Cutco has been around for quite some time and in 1990 they were sued by the attorney general for the State of Arizona for using deceptive recruiting practices. In 1990 the state of Wisconsin ordered the company to stop their deceptive recruiting practices.
In 2008 the company faced a class action lawsuit for not paying minimum wages to their sales representatives, a case which was settled in 2011 for 13 million dollars.
There was a class action lawsuit in 2014 for unpaid minimum wage and other related damages to individuals in Ohio, Missouri, New York, Florida, California, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan.
There were allegations that individuals who went through special training sessions between three and five days were not paid for that training. Federal law stipulates that employees who require any of their workers to attend a training have to give them payment for that training. A class-action lawsuit filed in California stipulated that the company violated the fair labor standards act as well as California state laws when they failed to pay workers for the time they spent in their initial training. They settled for 6.7 million dollars to a collective action for the employees in over five states, California included who didn’t receive compensation for the average of 15 hours they spent in training.
Finally, there was another class action lawsuit put forth by division managers in 2018 who claimed that they should have been compensated as employees, not as independent contractors.
While there may have been deceptive recruiting practices decades ago, the majority of the class action lawsuits against the company today have to do with changing employment laws and labor laws. There is no cost to join the company which is a clear sign of a reputable, legal MLM. Pyramid schemes require a hefty investment up front but Cutco doesn’t. They asked you to complete your training before you can become a sales representative and they loan you a sample set that you’re able to use for your demonstrations. You can continue borrowing that sample kit for all your demonstrations without ever having to purchase a full Cutco Knife Set. If you decide to quit the company, you just return that knife set. This is yet another indication of a reputable MLM because they never require you to purchase their materials at any point while you work for them.
The company has a very good rating with the Better Business Bureau and they are a legitimate business that sells legitimate products. They have faced a lot of class action lawsuits, but again, they don’t require you to purchase a certain number of products upfront or regularly, they don’t make outrageous claims about the monetary potential you can make, and they put the emphasis on selling the products over recruiting other distributors. What’s more, the products are very high quality and very popular. Even though the knife sets are a costly investment they come with free sharpening and a forever guarantee which makes him very high quality, another indication that the company emphasizes high-quality products over recruitment as the main source of income.
Still, that doesn’t mean they aren’t without their issues, so if you have dealt with Cutco and you have a complaint that they haven’t settled, you still have options including consumer arbitration. We can help.
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