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As an example here, my father and grandfather used to swear by Craftsman tools. No matter the context, if there was a Craftsman version, they'd go for it because they implicitly trusted the quality.

Then the Craftsman brand downshifted its production quality to compete in price and their reliability fell through the floor. Now my family will skip over Craftsman entirely even if it's competitive in price, since the breach of perceived trust soured them on the brand so completely.

Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new one and I walked out the door.

Had the same experience many years ago. I have a bunch of old Craftsman tools that are superb quality and will last decades more.

Sad to see them as an empty house brand now. Just like GE appliances, all that’s left is a sticker.

On the bright side, due to how the Power Tool industry works, that Craftsman is in many cases the previous gen Dewalt for 1/3 the price. Others are Porter Cable in red and without a sales rep. I’m tied to Ryobi batteries but I happily pick up Craftsman corded tools when those are an option.

Lol, yeah, if you Google “who owns which power tool brands” you can find the Rosetta Stone of tool brands to figure out which cheaper brands come from the same factories as the expensive stuff. It’s a web of deception for sure.

Have you tried the GE Big Boys series of appliances? They look built like tanks.

I don't doubt there are plenty of experiences that went the wrong way, but wanted to share an alternative anecdote that went well.

I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.

IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.

Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.

You actually bought a Haier dishwasher with a GE sticker on it.

It’s hard to tell these days whether you’re buying a product from a brand you trust or from a company that bought the brand you trust.

Though, having said that, I recently bought a Bosch refrigerator because Bosch is still Bosch and I trusted Bosch.

But the refrigerator is crap, broken on arrival and it took 5 phone calls and 3 weeks to get service.

In Haier's case they bought way more than "just" the GE sticker. Haier is still using factories built by GE Appliances for many of their GE branded appliances and in many cases using the same people/processes/pipelines as before.

There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.

Good point. I forgot about the Haier acquisition.

While I was pleased with this particular purchase, my ability to trust any brand in general has been diminishing with age and each new betrayal of that trust.

I have a growing heuristic that is (at least in part) inversely related to number of employees and the time a company has been publicly traded.

Sears was still doing this when I worked there in 2016. They went as far as to bust open a set of 24 drill bits to replace one of them on the spot.

Wait. Someone returned a drill bit (a wear item) for replacement?

Crap like that is why companies have walked away from consumer-biased warranty policies. LLBean had to change theirs as well: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ll-bean-changed-its-retu...

It is plausible that it did not live up to reasonable expectations in some way. Equally likely that someone was being dishonest though.

Example: I once returned a board that I had cut in half. It was window trim with a shaped profile, and I had previously purchased and installed some of the same SKU before. When I went to install my freshly cut board next to the first ones, it was a little too obvious that it was from a different batch or manufacturer with a slightly different profile.

I’d totally bring one back if it failed because they forgot to harden it or something. Put it in some wood and the first time you use it the threads reverse because the metal is so soft.

What else is a lifetime warranty supposed to mean on a drill bit? It's not something vague like the "100% satisfaction" you linked.

If they offer the warranty on drill bits, then there's nothing wrong with using the warranty on drill bits. It's not being a bad customer.

It's kind of like returning sandpaper that you've worn out though. :/

Same thing, if the sandpaper has an over the top warranty for the product category then it's fine to use it.

The bit had snapped in half iirc, not worn out.

> Wait. Someone returned a drill bit (a wear item) for replacement?

Could be. Maybe it snapped?

I've snapped dozens of drill bits in my life (from many different brands). Exactly zero of those were a manufacturing defect.

> I've snapped dozens of drill bits in my life (from many different brands). Exactly zero of those were a manufacturing defect.

Oh, I agree - I've snapped dozens as well due to misuse.

But it is not inconceivable that a bit snapped due to manufacturing defect (I just don't know how the store can tell the difference).

Same thing happened with Canadian Tire's "Mastercraft" brand. I think it was always viewed as a Craftsman knock off, but they used to have a lifetime warranty and pretty good quality. I now mostly regard Mastercraft as disposable junk.

this also happens on day to day consumer grade stuff. new brands of hotdogs will be yummy, the next batches will be shitty. same with bread from bakeries.

it's crazy how the loss in quality begets them increased profits in nthe short term, but costs them their entire business in the long term.

the high quality products can be the loss leaders, and they can just commoditize the compliments.

why would you reduce the size of bread, when you can just sell me overpriced peanut butter, jams, and spreads to come along with it?

a good lesson in trust and social psychology. when trust is built, people throw their money at you.

Very much feels like long term brand building has fallen out of fashion. Has the incentives shifted or is it just viral greed?

Basic greed is sufficient, no need for the viral part

A "race to the bottom" can certainly feel like "viral" collective behavior even if you want to consider all the individual inputs just "basic greed"

It makes a difference. If you start with several quality brands and one of them sells out, you can switch to one of the others. If everyone pulls the same shit, there's nowhere to go.

And everyone is pulling the same shit.

Far too many companies these days are willing to burn down their brand for some quick bucks. It's so common that I'm sure it's part of the MBA curriculum.

Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback

Dutch : Vertrouwen komt te voet en gaat te paard ( Thorbecke )

https://thalein.medium.com/trust-arrives-on-foot-and-leaves-...

Wonderful saying (a new one to me) and appreciate the explanatory article, thanks.

Interesting correlate with "stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down" - stock prices being strongly influenced by trust.

from the linked article:

> people and organisations alike tend to be judged by the worst thing they do

Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days.

It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.

There are a few. Cockos makes an amazing Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that competes with the top names in the industry.

While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.

A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest, unless you can somehow guarantee their leadership won't change (or is unlikely to, at least).

> A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest

If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".

> > A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest

> If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".

They are doing "right thing" now so later when they dominate market they will be able to squeeze you like a lemon. Scorpion and a frog situation. It's just in their nature.

I suspect the incentive to care about company reputation has genuinely decreased.

I'll note companies seem genuinely okay with being on lists of the most hated brands in America.

Edit: typo

When does the “for now” stop? When is a brand actually a mark of a certain quality and when is it a facade for a swapped tooling line backed by a dozen products? We might have had reliable brands once, but no longer — now all products have to be evaluated individually.

Darn Tough has made some fairly consistently awesome socks up in VT for a couple decades now.

don’t jinx it!

I used to get some great stuff from icebreaker too, but after they were acquired by VF (also owners of Vans and North face), surprise, surprise, pretty much zero purchases since.

Is there a reason for this trend? Why does so many companies seem to have stopped caring about their long term reputation?

Because the owners are not in it for the long term. It’s an agent problem - if they can take a company with a 2% profit margin and juice that up to 10%, they’ve captured 5 years worth of profits in a single year. If it takes 5 years for the market to catch on that the company’s gone to hell, that’s 25 years worth of profits available for stock buybacks-err, new investments. The company’s dead within a decade, but the owners and investors got a bucket full of cash.

Under Clinton, there was an effort to tie executive compensation to company performance. The idea was good, but the consequence was that executives got paid much more in stock than in cash. That led executives to juice the stock price.

The trouble, perhaps, is that the only ways of measuring performance tend to be financial.

Perhaps a poll of the employees, or an association of customers, ought to figure somewhere.

> The trouble, perhaps, is that the only ways of measuring performance tend to be financial.

An other strategy would be to place a financial value on "trust". That should be too hard, since brands already have financial value tied to them.

> Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it."

A security architect at a Bank offered a very pithy version of this to me: "People hate banks, but they trust us. Best not lose their trust."

Your last point is very much true. If the family no longer controls their company, or even, just their founding members, it sets off a huge red flag for me. Sometimes, it's for the better. But, if I had trust in that company, it most likely stemmed from their work.

There are some nice examples of founding members going above and beyond to maintain their control, which may not look like it from the get go. Ubisoft comes to mind. I may not like some of their games, but I really appreciate the efforts of the Guillemot brothers.

On the other hand, founders stepping down as the company gets bigger or is faced with completely different challenges is usually for the better.

I can't imagine Daimler-Benz as it is now being led by the 3rd grandson of the original founder for instance. It would be a miracle if that person was well suited for directing a multi-national car manufacturer. Same way Microsoft wouldn't be the same if Bill Gates' son was at the helm.

If he's been groomed his whole life for running a multi national car company, there's reason to believe he would be better suited than just about anyone.

You'd think, but as the old saying goes: clogs to clogs in three generations.

(Meaning: the first generation starts off poor, is self made, hands over to the second generation which is less dynamic, which hands over to the third who wreck it and end up poor clog wearers again)

Thing is, education is hard and individual potential also varies a lot. We see this with royalty, where you have literally a country's resources to groom someone into being a high level individual who can deal with most social situations, but having them lead and expand a whole country in another issue altogether.

You'll have some Louis XIV sometimes, and many Louis XVI the rest of the time, with sprinkles of Charles II in the mix to spice it up.