I walked into the local Lowes last week, to be greeted just inside the entrance by a huge stack of Craftsman tool chests. I know Sears is in trouble, so I figured they might have cut some kind of a deal with Lowes to sell Craftsman tools. Finally got around to following up.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/10/25/lowes-offer-former-sears-brand-craftsman-tools-second-half-2018/797808001/Turns out, Sears cut a deal, all right -- they sold Craftsman to Stanley/Black & Decker. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! I'm sure some bean counter thought this was a good idea, but, to me, Sears WAS Craftsman, and Craftsman WAS Sears. Probably 90 percent of the times I've ever gone into a Sears store over the past 60 years it was to buy a Craftsman tool. The last few times I cut through Sears anchor store at the local mall (on my way to the Verizon storefront, usually), I've noticed that the hardware department was a shadow of its former size. Now I know why.
I don't know what Sears thinks they want to be. The beginning of the end was when they stopped pushing their in-house Kenmore appliance brand and started selling all the other brands -- as if they could compete with the discount sellers. Now they've spun off their iconic tool brand. There's nothing left.
To show what an iconic brand Craftsman is (or was), I have a personal story. My late wife was from South America. A couple or three years after we were married, she mentioned that her brother was highly distraught. His pickup had been broken into. He wasn't upset about the truck -- that was easily repaired under insurance. But he had somewhere gotten a Craftsman tool set, and that was stolen from the truck. I think he had bought them early in his working career, when he was sent by the bank he worked for to a city in the south that had a duty-free, enterprise zone. Wherever and however he got them, he couldn't find Craftsman tools anywhere to replace them, and that was all he wanted for Christmas.
My brother-in-law had been very good to us, and he didn't seem to have any problems accepting that his little sister had decided to marry un loco gringo, so we decided that if he wanted Craftsman tools, he would have Craftsman tools. we went up to the Sears in the mall (the same one I now use mostly as a shortcut to Verizon and the food court) and bought a mechanics tool set that was on sale. It cost about twice as much to ship it to him as it cost to buy it, but he was a happy camper.
And now Sears has sold off the brand. How many ways can you spell "dumb"? This, to me, is proof positive that Sears is just circling the drain.
And I also want to know how Lowes is going to position Craftsman tools against their own Kobalt line ...