Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Sears Sells Craftsman

Well. There you go.....

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/05/investing/sears-sells-craftsman-stanley-black-decker/

An estimated $900 million

As long as their hand tools are warrantied I'm OK. Most of it is made in China now anyway.

Wonder who will end up with Diehard Batteries?

Maybe the new owner will resurrect it.

For $900,000,000 I could have built a brand from scratch.

The Craftsman brand was bled dry.

Sears was bought for it's real estate portfolio and gutted.

We used to go to Sears every couple of weeks, now they are gone around here. I'll probably never go in another one.

When i was a kid our Christmas was from sears.

This.

When I was a kid the toilet paper came from Sears.

This is a tragedy for blue collar tradition. That said, I hope Stanley restores quality to pre-80's levels. I have some Stanley wrenches, and like them.

I don't know, but someone had to manufacture the Diehard line.

I have a Diehard Gold that came with my truck when I bought it in 2000 and as long as I keep the cells topped off, it kicks the engine over just like new even at -40* F.

Going up in the Sears Tower is kinda depressing.

They were a good example of what innovation, hard work, and American made could represent.

Now they just suck.




Dave

When I was a youngster, we would await the new Sears catalog with great expectations for the bra section.

This area was settled starting about 1905. There are a lot of Sears kit houses here. They came in by rail and were hauled to the building sites with horses & wagons.

Same here. Between Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, as a boy I would spend endless hours laying on the living room floor with their big thick catalogs and dream about all the hunting and fishing gear within. The trouble is that we were so poor, if I got ANYTHING I was lucky.

The Die Hard batteries are probably just made by Deka or Johnson Controls like most batteries in the US. There really aren't that many battery 'manufacturers'.

Sears is circling the drain. It won't be long now.

The internet is the new "catalog" and Amazon is the new Sears.

Sears is almost finished and a real problem exists for those employees that worked for them for 30 years. Those guys have a retirement program and it will no longer be funded.

Company held retirement accounts are usually the 1st source of cash for companies in trouble. You're far better off with your retirement held outside the company where they can't get at it. I've seen a number of companies get in trouble and that's happened every time. 401K's aren't the best retirement funds out there but at least they're safer than company held funds.
I worked for a large trucking company for nearly 20 years. It went down in the late 80's. My retirement was through the union and I'm drawing it now. All the management people lost theirs since the company drained it immediately when things got tough.

So here's a question for folks.

I have a nephew, some here have met him at one of the TN pig hunts, who is graduating high school here in a few months and will be heading to Purdue next year for Mechanical Engineering. When I graduated High School my Dad's gift to me was a several hundred piece Craftsman tool set. Here it is 35 years later and it's rare that a couple days don't go by that I don't still use that gift which makes it a great gift in my mind.

I would really prefer to buy something made in USA, or at least not China. Looked at Snap On. Um, no. $1600 for a 3/4" ratchet set. Who makes a decent set? Typical stuff, multiple ratchet sets, open end wrenches, screwdrivers etc for less than a grand? If not Chicom will go with pretty much anyplace else.