Hacker News Reader

Comment by 39896880 | Hacker News Reader

The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips, they swap out the provider.

View on HN

This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}.

Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb, Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese.

{1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Ke...

{2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-co...

The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco (currently) is that the company will back the product.

If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really strong confidence that they will take it back.

TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg

Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did.

Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.

To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.

Which provides an incentive to the manufacturer to produce at least decent quality products.

I've seen people drop off stained mattresses at Costco for return.

I think it's the other way around. Kirkland takes the "B quality stock" and sells it under it's own label. This is why they have an essentially no questions asked return policy. If the quality dips it eats into this margin and the provider is back to making next to nothing on units that fail to pass their own more stringent brand QA checks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com