Amazing how far that company has fallen; they were sort of a force to be reckoned with in the 70's and 80's with Craftsman and Allstate and Discover and Kenmore and a bunch of other things, and now they're basically dead as far as I can tell.
today is the first time I heard of sears and the comment about the sears towers and ibm literally gave me goosebumps.
To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason that is not the case customers can return the purchase back to Sears and Sears will pay for the return transportation charges.
My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.
I haven't tested these warranties since Craftsman was sold to Black and Decker, but when it was still owned by Sears I almost exclusively bought Craftsman tools as a result of their wonderful warranties.
Maybe not quite as hassle free as in years past, but I found the experience acceptable enough.
I bought a hydraulic press. It was missing bolts, has already been assembled before.
A friend bough some wheel Dollie's the threads on the castors were stripped out.
People buy things and use them once for their project, then return them.
But I'm not old enough to remember a time when lifetime warranties were unusual. In my lifetimes, a warranty on handtools has always seemed more common than not outside of the bottom-most cheese-grade stuff.
I mean: The Lowes house-brand diagonal cutters I bought for my first real job had a lifetime warranty.
And before my time of being aware of the world, JC Penney sold tools with lifetime warranties.
(I remember being at the mall with my dad when he took a JC Penney-branded screwdriver back to JC Penney -- probably 35 years ago.
He got some pushback from people who insisted that they had never sold tools, and then from people who insisted that they never had warranties, and then he finally found the fellow old person who had worked there long enough to know what to do. Without any hesitation at all, she told us to walk over to Sears, buy a similar Craftsman screwdriver, and come back with a receipt.
So that's what we did.
She took the receipt and gave him his money back.
Good 'nuff.)
This is covered by consumer protection laws in some places. 4 years on a spade would be pushing it, but I’d try with a good one. Here in New Zealand it’s called ‘The Consumer Guarantees Act’. We pay more at purchase time, but we do get something for it.
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He doesn't have private equity origins as far as I know. He came from DE Shaw, a very well respected and long running hedge fund.
Evidence suggests that maybe they were. "Focusing" obviously didn't work.
But at the end of the day, it was private equity and the hubris of a CEO who wasn't nearly as clever as he'd like to have thought he was.