Terrible marketing, but after all, Sears is owned by K-Mart, so you
really have a tarted up K-mart store instead of a major retailer.
Sears missed the boat decades ago, when they slashed quality to make
up for loss of catalog sales to the low end of the market. Those
sales went to the Wal-Marts, Home Depots, etc and now to the internet.
The marketing problem is selling more of what you are already
selling, not finding a new, higher margin market. It was a difficult
time when the changes happened (the early 80's downturn) and I think
the corporate board had become petrified at that point. They missed
the suburban super-expansion, and left their stores in the first
generation malls instead of moving them out like the crap stores did
-- not that I approve of urban sprawl, mind you, but in terms of
running a business, you have to stay with your customer base whether
you like it or not.
Since the Sears store was a long drive away and often in a
deteriorating neighborhood and WallyWorld was right around the corner
and you left less cash there, guess what happened. The merchandise
in Wally Word is junk, and vastly overpriced (the PROFIT margin on
most of it was upwards of 90% when they first moved to China!), but
Sears got left out. They did the same thing here, closed the highly
successful store on the north side of town, reportedly doing almost
twice the sales as the "home" store in the old mall, in favor of the
old store. Some bean counter thought it was more important to keep
the beans piled up in that corner, I guess.
Asleep at the switch. Kills lots of businesses.
Peter
On Apr 22, 2012, at 9:18 AM, Dieselhead wrote:
Ahhh Jerry, I won't mention where Craftsman are made...
I've given up on Sears entirely which probably helps to explain
their troubles. The staff is what really gets me, they're idiots.
For tools that don't have moving parts I've switched entirely to
Harbor Freight. Their wrenches and sockets are excellent. The only
downside as Jim Cathy pointed out is they laser etch their sockets
and if they get rusty you'll lose the etching. I'm planning to buy
a punch kit if that happens. They're good sockets and come in a
good carrier.
Only tools I have bought that say crapsman on them for the past 40
years are deep sockets. Last I knew, those were still good.
40 years ago I spent what was big money to me at the time for a
snears metric set, with combination wrenches and sockets. No
complaint about the sockets, the the combination wrenches were crap
even that long ago. The box walls were so thick that you could not
get them on nuts in counterbores. The fit on the nut was sloppy,
and the 12 "points" were so far from the outside of the wrench
that you round off a lot of nuts, or slip off and skin your knuckles.
Compared to the snears crapsman, the HF open end, box, or
combination wrenches are way better. Even if the cost was the
same, I would buy HF over snears. HF are better wrenches.
SK and truecraft are the best value for really high quality I have
seen. True Value/Ace is good too, but not really any better than HF.
I loved the SK 3/8 SAE socket set I used to have.
There are reasons Snears is going out of business. One reason is
the idiots they inhabit the stores with. Crapsman is another reason.
RE: etched sockets
I plan to color code mine, and/or write on them with an engraver.
I bought a set of the HF color coded sockets too, and a color coded
set of deep sockets. These are only available in 3/8 drive
unfortunately.
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_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com
To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
