Your good tools in your toolbox are now going to mean something else, as less quality cheap imports might be taking over the industry. There won't likely be high quality, low expense, guaranteed replacement, hand tools made in the USA again.
We were the last of about 4 generations to experience that, and unless you stock up at estate sales, ebay, and auctions, what you can pass down to future generations is out in your tool box.
Some Craftsman and Craftsman Professional tools were not made in the USA; Craftsman pliers were made in Germany, and Craftsman hacksaw was made in Sweden.
2010 (12.5 Years Ago) – Sears started introducing imported Craftsman hand tools:
2012 (10.5 Years Ago) – Sears discontinued Craftsman Professional and many USA-made hand tools.
2013 (9.5 Years Ago) – Sears launched new imported Craftsman Professional tools, shifting from USA to import suppliers across many product categories.
Sears was replacing formerly USA-made Craftsman hand tools with similar-looking imported tools. The new versions were widely considered to be inferior.
2014 (8.5 Years Ago) – Sears describes Craftsman as “America’s #1 brand of mechanics tools.”
Many long-term Craftsman tool fans had grown very dejected about the brand.
2017, January (6 Years Ago) – Craftsman Brand Sold to Stanley Black & Decker!
2017, March (6 Years Ago) – Stanley Black & Decker Pledges to Bring Craftsman Tool Production Back to USA
2017, July (6 Years Ago) – Stanley Black & Decker Acquired Waterloo Industries, a USA Tool Storage Manufacturer. Waterloo manufactured most of Sears’ Craftsman metal tool storage products.
2017, October (5 Years Ago) – Stanley Black & Decker announced that they would “leverage existing & expand US manufacturing footprint” and drew focus on their “capability to build upon legacy.”
2017, October (5 Years Ago) – Craftsman and Lowe’s announced a new partnership.
2018, April (4.5 Years Ago) – Under Stanley Black & Decker, Craftsman launched their first new mechanics tools.
2018, August (4.5 Years Ago) – Stanley Black & Decker relaunched the Craftsman tool brand.
2019, May (3.5 Years Ago) – Stanley Black & Decker announced a new USA factory for the production of Craftsman hand tools, a 425,000 square foot factory in Fort Worth Texas, where they planned to produce Craftsman mechanics hand tools, including ratchets, wrenches, sockets, and tool sets.
2020, March (2.5 Years Ago) – Craftsman teased that new USA-made mechanics tools and sets were “chroming soon.”
2020, December (2 Years Ago) – Craftsman announced that “more top-drawer tools are coming soon” and that they would be covered under a lifetime warranty.
2021, July (1.5 Years Ago) – Stanley Black & Decker had begun hiring machine operators in the region of the new plant.
2021, Fall (1 Year Ago) – Craftsman launched new V-Series tools at Lowe’s. These are premium (imported) tools that strongly resemble tools from Stanley Black & Decker’s Facom and USAG tool brands, which are popular in Europe and other regions outside the USA.
In late-2022, Craftsman said that the factory was open, operating, and producing tools.
Today a Craftsman executive stated that they expect for the factory to be closed by mid-2024.
I have a Craftsman tool box in my garage that I bought in the mid-1960's. It contains a full compliment of Craftsman wrenches and ratchet & socket sets that I bought in the same time frame, all as good now as the day I bought them. . Once upon a time I made my living with those! And no, it's not going anywhere until after I'm gone!
ReplyDeleteIts really a shame.
ReplyDeleteCraftsman used to be good tools, and the free replacement warranty was the best.
the Craftsman name wont exist in a few years.
Sears will be gone too,
I guess their legacy companies they started , Allstate insurance and Discover credit card will be around for a while.
why pay Craftsman price for tools made out of chinesium ?
When I can get a tool made in communist china at Northern Tool or Harbor Fright for 1/3 price.
but how can you compete? whatever it costs per hour for a employee in the US, gets you 10 hours labor in Mexico, and 50 hours labor in communist china. import tarrifs would balance this out.
we punish Cuba for 60 years because they are communists, but the fedgov kisses up to china because they are communist?
really irritated me too, to see all the cash for clunkers cars be destroyed, when the fedgov could have shipped them to Cuba as a symbol of attempting to normalize relations with them.
Not just the free replacement, but the easy to find location! Open all weekend too. Allstate certainly was a success, and insurance companies don't go out of business.
DeleteI believe Sears is gone. I don't think I've seen any Sears store, or tire place, in a long time.
I think you can compete, but only if you have a specific high quality item too big to import export, like Airstreams.
I don't think Zippo has a competitor either, and hundreds of companies used to make lighters.
Cuba wasn't punished for being communist, but it wanted nothing to do with American govt requiring it to pay back all the property seizures of the plantations, restaurants, casinos, etc that became Cuban property when Castro installed the communist govt to prevent the Batista corruption types from taking the people's money, again.
I think that's why the bad blood between Cuba and the USA
You're right, giving them the cars would have been a good idea, but only if we could export repair parts. They won't allow that to happen even for the cool old legacy pre revolution American made cars there.
I have reprints of some old late-1800's Sears catalogues, and they really were in a sense the Amazon of their day, a centralized seller of absolutely everything, including "long tail" items local shops could not afford to stock, shipped all over. The only real difference was that it was mail and rail instead of internet. I continue to be amazed at how utterly Sears missed the boat after one would have thought they, above all, would have known how to make the transition. But from what I've read, much of the blame goes to absolutely idiotic management as well as too much reliance on physical stores. When I was a kid, and well into young adulthood, one could order a thing and it would come in the mail. When my sister moved to Wales in the 1970's she found some things hard to buy in England, and shopped from the Sears catalogue there.
ReplyDeleteAh well, I too have a great 1970's Sears socket set, bought to replace an also great Montgomery Wards set that was stolen. Hard to beat the quality, and I did have to replace a couple of broken pieces with utterly no problem. I've found a couple of broken Craftsman tools on the road, and got new ones with no questions asked. Snapped a Craftsman pocket knife once, and again. New knife, no question on what stupid thing I'd been doing to break it. The only Craftsman tools I ever found lacking were the flare nut wrenches. For those, K-D or nothing! Silly expensive and worth every penny. For those, by the way, who have only experience with relatively recent Craftsman wrench sockets, too bad. The old ones were made better - the insides were deeper and better finished.
Remember when Allstate was the Sears brand for all things automotive.? In 1940-something my dad bought the premium Allstate utility trailer. Angle iron frame, 16 inch Jeep wheels, replaceable wood, and a trailing-arm torsion-spring "anti sway" axle (that really did work well). I still have it! Quit using it on the road a few years ago, but could fix it up if I got new fenders, though I think I may have lost the original serial number plate. It put in many thousands of miles of service for over 40 years and still hauls firewood behind the tractor. Those were the days!
I'm very familiar. I liked the Sears catalog of my childhood so much I bought one on ebay a couple years ago, from 1971. Half of it is hilarious fashion, the other half are the interesting things, and the toys I loved window shopping.
DeleteI guess that bad greedy decisions in management divested the Sears company from it's catalog sales, shortly before competition from the internet companies sprang up to replace Sears in the newly opened international trade, and Sears probably couldn't re-establish supplies and distribution in time to compete, and now, it's gone.
I've posted a couple Allstate one wheel trailers https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2010/10/one-wheel-trailer-trailcar-by-allstate.html
And Allstate was the Henry J predecessor, and had no trunk access from outside the car.
Allstate made a lot of scooters too