On Jan 5, 2017, Ed Pawlowski wrote
(in article ):

On 1/5/2017 4:14 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Thursday, January 5, 2017 at 1:40:38 PM UTC-5, Leon wrote:
Apparently Craftsman was around before Sears acquired it 90 years ago.
And now Sears is selling Craftsman tools to Stanley.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/sears-...-stanley-black
-decker-140907321--finance.html

I heard a (slightly) more in depth report this morning. They mentioned that
Sears is considering selling off the Kenmore and Die-Hard lines of business.

I don't recall if it's just a consideration or if negotiations had already
begun. Either way, the company is dwindling into nothingness.

They missed the boat a long time ago. Sers had a thriving catalog
business. They should have turned that into something like Amazon
before Amazon started up.

My recollection from the newspapers of the day is that the Catalog was losing
money, so after much agonizing, Sears closed its catalog, and laid 50,000
people off. I was stunned. The defense contractor I worked for at the time
had 20,000 employees, and produced far more paper than Sears Catalog ever
did. So, I can kinda guess what 20,000 of those Sears Catalog employees did,
which left the other 30,000 unaccounted for. With that kind of overstaffing,
no wonder they were losing money, with a bit of house cleaning, they could
have made money.


In the 1970s, I bought thousands of dollars worth of hand tools for working
on cars. Good stuff - still have and use it. The big debate of the day was if
Snap-On was worth their premium over Craftsman. Most of my friends did what I
did - Craftsman by default, Snap-On only if necessary.
The last technical thing I bought from Sears was an ordinary hose for
compressed air, probably 10 or 15 years ago. It was well made, but I
couldt get the hose to attach securely to threaded compressed air
connectors, like the Universal and IR and the like. It turned out that the
hose was equipped with oxygen fittings. My guess was that Sears had laid off
all the expensive grumpy old men who knew the difference, and who knew how to
use every tool Sears sold, and the newly-hired bright-eyed young thing
didnt realize that air and oxygen are not quite the same thing.

Id hazard that the self-defeating layoffs may have been a part of the
closing of the Catalog division.

Returned the hose, bought a Goodyear air hose from Home Depot. This hose
worked right from the box.

My guess that the Craftsman line will do better under Stanley/B&D, for all
their sins. At least Stanley/B&D know what an air hose is for. I wonder how
those bright-eyed young things will do under the new management.


Joe Gwinn