Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose. Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?

zulux

For us US folks, Amazon.jp will send you the unobtanium Makita tools you know you want.... like the Makita battery-operated microwave. Shout out to TTI for keeping Ryobi cheap, cheerful, and a good value. Not my cup of tea, but their stuff is reasonably fine for the price.

jader201

Not sure where “Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?” in the title came from. > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

joe_mamba

Same with all consumer white goods electronics: microwave ovens, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, etc. most white label by a few conglomerates with the same Chinese factories. The "high quality ones" that have their own R&D and manufacturing, are very expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.

Papazsazsa

The bottom line is that you can also compete by investing in quality.

Arubis

I don’t know if it’s by LLM generation or just contemporary style, but I find the style of omitting the subject from sentence after sentence after sentence unreadable. Once is fine. Six in a row is insufferable.

analog8374

Tangentially, Arrow T50 stapler used to be a tank but now it's wet shit. Apparently they changed to a new factory. So when your reputation is big you can slack on the product. Or is that naive? Is it the natural progression for all products? Like in that movie Brasil. The food is awful but the illustration of the food is wonderful.

jmclnx

Good example of what Private Equity did and doing to many industries. I also notice once a PE Firm takes over a Company, kiss quality good bye. They mentioned Eye Wear is next, I think the author can guess where that is going. No reason to doubt the same will happen to that industry too.

flanked-evergl

I recently decided I will go for the cheap Chinese store brand power tools for most things. It's about 1/5 to 1/3 the price of Ryobi, gets really good reviews, have been sold for more than 10 years now with the same batteries, and comes with a 5 year warranty which is 2 years more than ryobi. It's maybe not going to last 10 years, but at 1/5 the price it does not have to.

delichon

> Ryobi handles DIY at Home Depot. Milwaukee handles pros. The two brands don't eat each other. They serve different people at different price points with different expectations So market fit is driving both worse and better products at the same time. Cheap DIYers like me are buying the cheapest stuff we can find, and complaining that it's as cheap as its price. My neighbor the contractor buys the expensive stuff and finds that the quality at least somewhat reflects that. Worse on purpose is my fault, because I'm the guy who bought a cheap Ryobi saw, instead of none at all. Plane flights are worse because I'm the guy who buys the cheapest ticket and tolerates the resulting discomforts, instead of staying home. You can see that through the lens of greed and exploitation, or as just a market evolving to supply consumer demand.

mghackerlady

Snap-on stays winning

jcattle

> The pattern > This isn't a tools story. > The names change. The industries change. The strategy doesn’t. The pattern This isn't an insightful blog. The names change. The topics change. The slop doesn’t.

awkwardleon

FWIW these worseonpurpose articles have been popping up regularly, consistently accused of being slop, and the purported author has been called out as a Palantir AI shill. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779481

0xbadcafebee

I think most pros agree that Klein tools have fallen off. And conspicuously missing on the list is Wiha and Wera. Wiha is a family-owned private company in Germany. Relies on self-funding and conservative growth using long-standing relationships with German banks rather than private equity. They manufacture in Germany, Vietnam, Switzerland, and a tiny plant in the US. Well known by electricians. Much better warranty. Wera is also privately owned, by Bitburger Holding. They avoid debt financing and focus on high-volume production and advertising. Almost all of their manufacturing has left Germany, and is now Czech Republic and Thailand. Well known by auto mechanics. Limited warranty.

legitster

The big thing that happened to power tools was Lithium-Ion batteries. All of these companies competed when they were still corded electric tools. You could just make a really good drill or saw or router. Interchangeable batteries got really good and made every set of tools a platform. More importantly, there are only a handful of sources to get batteries from. For all these companies to differentiate and compete they needed to insert their products into wide lines of platforms.

DeathArrow

>These companies prove the same thing from the opposite direction. You don't have to get acquired. You don't have to take the PE money. You can just keep making good products and telling everyone else to go to hell. It's harder, and it's slower, and the growth chart won't impress a Wall Street analyst. But the tools last. And the brand means something 50 years from now instead of ending up in a clearance bin. How can we convince business owners to take this path? It seems in a future everything will be owned by a few megacorps and crappyfied.

analog8374

FTA : The tool companies that are still good. Klein, Makita, Knipex, Channellock, Hilti, Bosch.

ChrisMarshallNY

I use Makita. WFM. YMMV.

amluto

Sigh, DeWalt. A few years ago, there were (I think) first to market with a cordless electric leaf blower that was competitive with gas for serious use — it had a blower in a backpack, two battery slots, used giant 40V “DeWalt XR” batteries, and could operate at high power and for quite a long time. It was far from perfect — the backpack was not so comfortable and a bit heavy, and it was expensive. Still, the market was obviously growing and is currently booming, and DeWalt should have been a leader. Instead they never followed up, and they gave everyone who bought one a giant “screw you” by discontinuing the batteries. And left the market wide open for new players and the big gas landscape tool companies (Stihl, Husqvarna) to step in. Attention executives: when you lead the market in a growing category, you need to invest in it!

lacewing

Just for the record, this is a novelty domain with a history of posting AI-generated articles that are clearly designed to get clicks based on nostalgia for how random things "used to be better": https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=worseonpurpose.com

titanomachy

I'm so tired of reading things in this imbecilic ChatGPT voice. I'm going to start flagging the most egregious AI slop, following my interpretation of the guidelines: > If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it Dang, feel free to let me know if this is an inappropriate use of flagging.