Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new one and I walked out the door.
I don't doubt there are plenty of experiences that went the wrong way, but wanted to share an alternative anecdote that went well.
I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.
IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.
Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.
In Haier's case they bought way more than "just" the GE sticker. Haier is still using factories built by GE Appliances for many of their GE branded appliances and in many cases using the same people/processes/pipelines as before.
There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.
While I was pleased with this particular purchase, my ability to trust any brand in general has been diminishing with age and each new betrayal of that trust.
I have a growing heuristic that is (at least in part) inversely related to number of employees and the time a company has been publicly traded.
On the bright side, due to how the Power Tool industry works, that Craftsman is in many cases the previous gen Dewalt for 1/3 the price. Others are Porter Cable in red and without a sales rep. I’m tied to Ryobi batteries but I happily pick up Craftsman corded tools when those are an option.
Lol, yeah, if you Google “who owns which power tool brands” you can find the Rosetta Stone of tool brands to figure out which cheaper brands come from the same factories as the expensive stuff. It’s a web of deception for sure.
I’d totally bring one back if it failed because they forgot to harden it or something. Put it in some wood and the first time you use it the threads reverse because the metal is so soft.
It is plausible that it did not live up to reasonable expectations in some way. Equally likely that someone was being dishonest though.
Example: I once returned a board that I had cut in half. It was window trim with a shaped profile, and I had previously purchased and installed some of the same SKU before. When I went to install my freshly cut board next to the first ones, it was a little too obvious that it was from a different batch or manufacturer with a slightly different profile.
