Home Depot introducing DRM to power tools

Presently if you go to buy a power tool at Home Depot you have to find somebody who will open up a locked cabinet where the tools are on the shelf, which burns manpower to do that. If they don’t do that yes organized groups will steal a large number per day in certain areas. If it’s truly just an anti theft thing then it’s not a big deal. If they try to turn it into something “value add” then likely it’ll be an obnoxious headache for customers when their battery powered saw stops running because it says you need to buy an authentic dewalt blade to continue..

Are there really so many people casually stealing a giant box with a heavy power-tool to make it worth it to add all this DRM with Bluetooth and other crap in it?

Can't believe this is not a parody.

And for what I thought was a technologically competent company like Home Depot to be doing it makes it even worse.

On the face of it it's a terrible idea. Adding complexity, BT, to a construction workers table saw. I mean, you can't just add BT to every expensive tool to begin with. This will cause more problems than it solves. It'd be much simpler to simply remove items from display that are prone and leave just empty boxes. The look but don't touch approach kinda like they already do in a lot of places. Really it's a just a lazy attempt at theft deterrence. Considering HD likes to buy in bulk and so receives and then sells a generally inferior product (simple to do), makes perfect sense.

I don't think it's fair to call this DRM. Real DRM imposes some sorts of restrictions on what you can do with something you bought, but this seems to be completely and permanently deactivated upon purchase.