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J. Clarke[_4_]

In article ,
says...

Leon wrote:
On 1/15/2017 3:20 PM, Bill wrote:
Electric Comet wrote:
birds of a feather flock together so now craftsman stanley and black
decker will all become equally crappy

but i wonder if the craftsman tools with lifetime guarantee will still
be honored or will they just throw that out and go for complete
mediocrity

If you just spent 900 million on the company, what would you do?

What you paid for a company has nothing to do with whether you honor
old guarantees/warranties or not.

You may or may not be obligated to honor those warranties.

You are simply the new owner of the company, the company still has
legal obligations.

How do you think that the shareholders of S felt after the bankruptcy
and reorganization?
I would suppose that any legal liability for old tools would have ended
there. The new owner may feel it is in there best interest to maintain
the warranties, but they may also not. My point was that as the new
owner, I think you get to "call the tune", especially on a tools sold
before the reorganization--which represents almost "pure liability" to
you (I am not a lawyer). How about those folks who collect old tools
and turn them in for new ones? They are angle shooters, and, IMO,
everyone deserves protection from people who would seek to profit from
"loopholes" (that are "out of the spirit" of the warranty). S and SHLD
have both treated them more charitably than I would have...

If they bought the company, i.e. obtained a
majority of the shares of stock, then the
liability with regard to contracts and
guarantees would be unchanged I believe.

However it is common to buy the _assets_ from
the corporation, not the corporation itself,
leaving the corporation cash rich but with no
products, manufacturing facilities, staff or
anything else except cash and liabilities. In
that case the new owners would be under no
obligation to honor warranties, as those
warranties were issued by the corporation, which
still exists. You could sue the corporation but
the courts would tell you to get in line behind
the rest of the creditors.

In the case of Craftsman, it appears that
Craftsman was an asset of Sears, not a
corporation its own right, so any warranty
claims should be against Sears--as long as
there's a Sears store you should be able to walk
in and demand satisfaction, however if they no
longer sell tools there's precious little
satisfaction to be had--they might give you the
cash value of it or something. And if Sears
goes away it's unlikely that you're going to
have any recourse at all.