Interesting video that explains a lot.
Stanley Black &Decker also now big in the lawn mower business as they bought up the last 80% of MTD and also bought Excell Industries ( high end mowers (Hustler) .
Lawn mower manufacturers are in a extremely competitive business and will beat up on there suppliers over pennies on a part.

 

Haven’t seen it but I’m reminded of the “Great Stanley Downgrade” in regards to hand planes.

It’s really a shame what happened to those brands. No offense, WNT, but you have to admit Sears produced some pretty lousy ww’ing machines for a while. (I know, I owned them). My understanding was after WWII with the explosion of suburbia & homeownership, there was a market targeted at the weekend warriors for cheaper, consumer level machines. Stanley did the same thing with their Handyman line of planes.

Everything Stanley touches seems to get pulled down. Except for the tape measures I guess. Hopefully DeWalt will maintain.

The last time I was at Lowes I took a look at their table saws - pretty awful.

I heard some of the DW sold in the big box stores are a cheaper line. Any truth in that?

 

Haven’t seen it but I’m reminded of the “Great Stanley Downgrade” in regards to hand planes.

It’s really a shame what happened to those brands. No offense, WNT, but you have to admit Sears produced some pretty lousy ww’ing machines for a while. (I know, I owned them). My understanding was after WWII with the explosion of suburbia & homeownership, there was a market targeted at the weekend warriors for cheaper, consumer level machines. Stanley did the same thing with their Handyman line of planes.

Everything Stanley touches seems to get pulled down. Except for the tape measures I guess. Hopefully DeWalt will maintain.

The last time I was at Lowes I took a look at their table saws - pretty awful.

I heard some of the DW sold in the big box stores are a cheaper line. Any truth in that?

The dewalt lines are very confusing. Their drills especially.

They carry several drill models in their "standard" 20v Max line which have brushes. These tend to be the low end drills and they are common in their multi tool packs.

Their XR series is their next step up. Brushless motors, more power, but the same 20V max battery.

Their XR Atomic tools are special made for one of the big box stores, but they seem very similar to many XR tools but marketed for small size.

The flexvolt advantage line can accept 20 or 60v batteries.

The 60v flexvolt tools tend to be marketed as corded tool replacements for tradesmen looking for circular saws, impact wrenches, angle grinders, and specialty tools

 

Dr, Robert you would enjoy the video if you haven't seen it.
In defense of the "good" Craftsman tools from the 60's, my very first 10" table saw was a Craftsman 100 series with the cast iron extensions and a brown Craftsman 1 HP motor. I used the heck out of that saw, started with a HSS blade, no carbide, I broke a trunnion and had it brazed together, moved it 3 times in different houses and finally parted it out when I put the 3 12" Craftsman direct drive saws together in my present woodshop. I used the table as a spacer between two of the 12" saws. It never really quit working, just outlived it's purpose. It had a nice rack and pinion fence which was pretty accurate.

Back then, Craftsman was the only brand Sears sold retail other than Wards which sold Powercraft. I was never a shopper at Wards because I liked Craftsman hand tools and their showroom was on my way to work, so I stopped in so often the sales guys knew me by name! Long before that, I bought my first .22 rifle, a JC Higgins, at a small town Sears when I was visiting my grandpa in Indiana. I was 13 years old, paid for it with my allowance, about $30.00, but grandpa kept it on the farm until I was 16 and old enough to bring it home. I still have hundreds of Craftsman wrenches, sockets, several corded drills and a few sanders.

 

Place I retired from had a lot of expertise in metal working and 1 of thousands of different parts they made was a
specialty tool for the aircraft industry if I remember right.
I remember just a few years back they had looked into making socket wrench sets but determined the
segment was too crowded and profit potential was nil.

Businesses get sold , consolidated ect when the profits are no longer there.
I was in a couple of them , not small tool companies but large machine making companies ($250,000 - millions a piece).
Going great guns for decades till world competition caught up with them .
Cheap labor/taxes few regulations on safety environment and it's hard to compete.

 

I worked in those "fancy digs at the Sears Tower" he mentioned. Craftsman is just one interesting story of what was destroyed over the years. Weatherbeater and Easy Living. Diehard auto batteries. Kenmore. There is a story behind what happened to each. I think the funniest thing though, might be the decision to stop selling gasoline. If you remember Sears back in the 60s (maybe into the 70s) and earlier, you might remember they had gas pumps by their auto centers. The story goes that a new executive asked why they were selling something that only made a penny or two per unit (unit meaning gallon). That was the end of it. Of course, he didn't realize when you sell millions and millions of gallons, those pennies added up to a pretty big profit. And, he didn't think about the fact that the gas pumps kept people coming to the auto centers where they were likely to return for repairs when they had car trouble. I still remember the Tower shaking the day it was announced Walmart passed Sears as the largest retailer.

You can argue about quality, but I think the more important measurement is value, that being what you get for your money. Back in the day it was probably next to impossible to beat the value Sears offered in many product areas. Not everyone can afford, or needs, top of the line. Sometimes good enough is good enough, especially when it's what you can afford.

 

Old timers have a name for that, "penny wise and pound foolish."

This is a great historical view of those three major quality brands:

Where have all the good tools gone, long time passing?

 

Every tool manufacturer with the exception of 1 has been taken over by conglomerates. The only company, to the best of my knowledge and research, that still males it's own tools is Makita. I still have, and use regularly, the old, old Porter-Cable drop foot saw where every hour of use you turn a cup 1/4 turn to push grease into the gears. I have 6 Porter-Cable routers (one is actually a Rockwell-PorterCable) Including a Model 100 chrome top and a bunch of 690's. I have one newer router and it is the only one that has ever been in and out of a repair shop. Both my jointer and shaper are Delta-Invicta from the early 80's.

 

I don't see Kobalt on this chart, do you know where they fall? I know most people probably do not consider them a full time contractor brand, but they have worked really well for me under some hard use at home. And from many others that I have heard use them.

 

I liked craftsman tools when they were part of sears. I haven't bought any craftsman tools since so I don't know what they are doing now. I had a falling out with porter cable tools about 20 years ago when they started making tools not worth bringing home. Then Delta, they started making junk tools and their attitude toward their customers was terrible. They would discontinue a tool and take parts from their repair parts center to finish production of what they had started. Parts then became unobtainable almost immediately on the discontinued machine.

 

One thing the big retailers do quite often, and Walmart is the worst of them all is you can't buy a standard model in their stores. Everything will have one feature or another changed, model numbers especially. Model numbers at Walmart are all unique to Walmart specifically. That's so you can't comparison shop and get the lower price than another retailer because that item isn't sold anywhere else. They slip in cheaper parts even though you might believe the product is identical to the competition..It's not. It has a cumulative effect of making all brands just a little cheaper and cheaper everywhere over time until the public begins to hate the product in general..
Hopefully with the fall of Chinese manufacturing this will start to reverse. China's days as the world's manufacturing floor are numbered. Everything in China is corrupt without exception and tools are no exceptions to the rule. Big, global manufacturers are leaving China as fast as they can move their physical plant and the Chinese government isn't exactly doing themselves any favor to keep them in China.

 

If you're interested in the future of manufacturing in China check out Peter Zeihan on YouTube.. He's predicting there won't even be the CCP in China within a decade, but that's yet to be seen. Zeihan is a guy who studies demographics and finance around the world. China is BY FAR the single most rapidly aging place on the planet thanks to 40 years of one child policy and the not so fun practice of killing baby girls in their society. Half their population will no longer exist by 2050 and there's no way out for them.
Most of the manufacturing that used to be here, but moved to China in the 1980s is coming back to the Americas.. It's a huge part of what's driving inflation. It's very expensive to rebuild the manufacturing plant on the other side of the globe.

 

I heard a story about Walmart and China, It used luggage as an example. Walmart couldn't make an agreement to send the work of making American Tourester in China, so they found a company in China and made a deal with A T to give the company in China a license to make it there if they could guarantee X number of pieces. W M could then say they were not sending our work overseas. It was sort of like buying aftermarket auto parts.