Comment by bryanlarsen

Worthy if its own hacker news post. Would love to see it.

FWIW, I bought a Craftsman 1/4" drive ratchet/socket set at a Lowes Home Improvement store last year, and when I got it home and started messing with it, the ratchet jammed up immediately (before even being used on any actual fastener). I drove back over there the next day and the lady at the service desk took a quick look, said "go get another one off the shelf and come back here." I did, and by the time I got back she'd finished whatever paperwork needed to be done, handed me some $whatever and said "have a nice day."

Maybe not quite as hassle free as in years past, but I found the experience acceptable enough.

> My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.

This is covered by consumer protection laws in some places. 4 years on a spade would be pushing it, but I’d try with a good one. Here in New Zealand it’s called ‘The Consumer Guarantees Act’. We pay more at purchase time, but we do get something for it.

Lots of tools have lifetime warranties. Harbor Freight's swap process is probably fastest, these days, for folks with one nearby. Tekton's process is also painless, but slower: Send them a photo of the broken tool, and they deliver a new tool to your door.

But I'm not old enough to remember a time when lifetime warranties were unusual. In my lifetimes, a warranty on handtools has always seemed more common than not outside of the bottom-most cheese-grade stuff.

I mean: The Lowes house-brand diagonal cutters I bought for my first real job had a lifetime warranty.

And before my time of being aware of the world, JC Penney sold tools with lifetime warranties.

(I remember being at the mall with my dad when he took a JC Penney-branded screwdriver back to JC Penney -- probably 35 years ago.

He got some pushback from people who insisted that they had never sold tools, and then from people who insisted that they never had warranties, and then he finally found the fellow old person who had worked there long enough to know what to do. Without any hesitation at all, she told us to walk over to Sears, buy a similar Craftsman screwdriver, and come back with a receipt.

So that's what we did.

She took the receipt and gave him his money back.

Good 'nuff.)

Harbor freight is like that too.

It wasn't possible for them to be well managed at the time it mattered. Sears was loaded with debt by private equity ghouls; same story for almost all defunct brick and mortar businesses; Amazon was a factor, but private equity is what actually destroyed them.

I worked at Sears at the time when Amazon first started becoming a household name. I for the life of me couldn’t understand why they didn’t make a copycat site called the Sears Catalog Online. But then I think about it and management wanted salesmanship because selling maintenance agreements was their cash cow. Low margin sales won in the long term hence we have Walmart and Amazon as the biggest retailers.

Timing is a difficult variable.

They weren't wrong.

Evidence suggests that maybe they were. "Focusing" obviously didn't work.

But at the end of the day, it was private equity and the hubris of a CEO who wasn't nearly as clever as he'd like to have thought he was.

SpaceX is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Reusable rockets were "known" to be financially infeasible because the Space Shuttle was so expensive. NASA & oldspace didn't seriously pursue reusable vehicles because the mostly reusable Space Shuttle cost so much more than conventional disposable vehicles.

Similar to how Sears didn't put their catalog online in the 90's because putting it online on Prodigy failed so badly in the 80's.