@cwhartman My dad was a lifelong Sears stan. I have boxes of old Craftsman tools to prove it, and could have had several times as many except even the Craftsman name couldn't keep some of their power tools from being crap.
Lampert was the worst thing to happen to the company. A bully and utter incompetent whose only virtue was to prove how robust his predecessors had made the company, by how long it took him to finally destroy it through mismanagement and appalling decisionmaking.
*not best
@ardgedee I stocked up on tools when I worked at Sears Hardware, most of which I still have. One of the nice quirks of their inventory system was that after items were discontinued for a certain amount of time (I think one year), inventory was zeroed out. Managers were supposed to destroy any stock found at that point.
What happened instead was a savvy, poorly paid employee could dig through dusty boxes of stock, or check things on the shelf that seemed neglected to look for anything zeroed out. Managers would do the right thing and sell to store employees (we'd all get one of whatever it was) for a token cheap amount ($1-$5) rather than trash it. It could have been a way to get employees to actually work stock, but I'm not sure that level of sophistication was in play.
Most of the power tools were indeed trash, I tried to steer customers who actually use their tools towards just about anything else.
What happened instead was a savvy, poorly paid employee could dig through dusty boxes of stock, or check things on the shelf that seemed neglected to look for anything zeroed out. Managers would do the right thing and sell to store employees (we'd all get one of whatever it was) for a token cheap amount ($1-$5) rather than trash it. It could have been a way to get employees to actually work stock, but I'm not sure that level of sophistication was in play.
Most of the power tools were indeed trash, I tried to steer customers who actually use their tools towards just about anything else.
@cwhartman I was, literally, just saying the part about Amazon yesterday. I went to JC Penney's to buy a pillow.
Military brat overseas, Sears catalogue for clothes!
@cwhartman In the 60s, when my dad was building out his workshop, Sears's TOTL power tools were built by Delta, Porter-Cable, etc... people collect 'em now because they're cheap (relative to new equipment) and still run great.
Those weren't the ones my dad got. He usually purchased at the "good" or "better" tier.
Those weren't the ones my dad got. He usually purchased at the "good" or "better" tier.
You could definitely see the cracks starting to form and a lot of mismanagement as the years went on, even before the idiotic K-Mart merger and Eddie Lampert decided to strip the company for parts. They can and should have been Amazon, with all the catalog and distribution infrastructure in place, but got out of the mail order business just in time for the internet to take off.