My 15 year old Sears Craftsman table saw died today. (Specifically, the motor. It’s dead, Jim.) It was a good table saw, and I loved using it. Naturally, I wanted another one like it.
So I go to the Sears website, and it’s got another table saw that looks a lot like the one I had, with some upgrades (e.g. laser track). At a reasonable price - $100 more than the old one, but in 15 years, that’s no surprise. So I click to add it to my cart.
It wants my zip code. Fine. I give it my zip.
It tells me it won’t ship it to a store within 100 miles for pickup.
And it won’t ship it to my home, either. Not just “you’ll have to pay extra,” just “shipping unavailable.”
So they’ve got table saws they want to sell. I want to buy one. I’d pay for shipping unless it was astronomical. But they won’t sell it to me. No way, no how.
Yeah, I know: Sears is in terrible shape, what did I expect?
I guess what I expect now is to see what Lowe’s or Home Dopey has.
But dammit, I was really happy with my old table saw. I really wanted to buy whatever Sears had that was pretty much the same thing.
After Sears announced that it’s closing down, I noticed that Lowes is now carrying Craftsman tools/products. Don’t know if they are the same quality or have the lifetime warranty like they did when with Sears, but it might be worth looking into. SC
Ace hardware sold them for a while too after sears sold the brand to the company that made all the craftsman stuff for them
actually I think you can find craftsman stuff on amazon too
They sell what I think is what you want on Amazon. Free shipping if you have Prime.
I’ve been noticing this phenomena a lot on this board lately. All the time people talk about how they can’t find a certain thing and it’s right on Amazon.
A couple years ago I was looking for a microwave to give my brother for Xmas. I went to the mall, entered close to a Sears, and decided to see if it had really gone to crap. Yep, it had. All the floor models were dusty and looked like something from 20 years ago. The saleslady in that section was on crutches and looked to be in her 90’s. The cheapest microwave was listed at $80. I knew I could get one for under half that, so I left. Sears has been dying for years.
on the sears and k mart websites 70 percent of anything listed is sold by somewhere else my aunt has a sears store card and figured since sears was going out and you couldn’t use that card anywhere else shed buy her Christmas on it
Sad thing was even after all the buying there still was half the balance left because shed bought everything that was worth buying in her opinion
It’s noteworthy to consider just how far good ole Sears, Roebuck & Company has fallen from it’s heyday, when it was a catalog company that would happily deliver to you a kit to build a whole house via train.
Maybe if they would have stuck with the catalogs long enough to transition straight to the internet, thereby skipping the whole bricks & mortar stage, they would be bigger than Amazon is now…
That part’s easy: Eddie Lampert has figured out how to make money off of the undead corpse of Sears, coming and going, by a bunch of transactions with himself as Sears CEO on one side of the deal, and himself as himself on the other side of the deal. (Great work if you’re rich enough to pull it off.) The American Prospect had a good story on this last fall.
I’m getting a weird runaround from searspartsdirect.com, but I was able to find out that the motor sold for $162.99 in February 2013. It’s almost certainly more expensive now (if I can get it at all), and frankly I’d rather buy a new table saw for $300 than pay that much for a motor and have to put it in myself.
searspartsdirect does have a well-illustrated guide to replacing the motor. It requires the use of two funky tools, designed for that specific use, that came with the table saw when I bought it. I may or may not still have them, and if I do, I may or may not be able to lay my hands on them sometime this year. So on the whole, I think replacing the motor is a last resort.
I’m going to swing by Home Dopey on my way home tomorrow and see what they’ve got in store, before I look online. I just can’t tell from a pic online whether it’ll feel solid or flimsy or somewhere in between.
Black and Decker owns Craftsman now, and I found something saying it would be sold in Lowes. So maybe they are just another brand to Sears now. I’d stay away from Sears myself. I just bought a new dryer after my old Kenmore one died (in only 30 years) but I’m staying away from Kenmore now. I dealt with Sears/Kenmore when my oven broke, and it was a pain.
thye got sucked in to mall culture which is a byproduct of post ww2 car culture and the brand new highway/freeway system
a lot of people in the late 40s and 50s bought cars whod never owned one before the war and it became a status thing "lets drive down the newly created high way to the new shopping center and we can have lunch or dinner there too " like it was a Sunday day trip
The sad thing is the malls gave such great dals to ears and penneys for space that they closed their stand a alone stores to move to the mall
Catalog shopping was for hicks in the sticks or people too poor for cars …… the funny thing is my great grandma in said the same thing about in store shopping that internet shoppers do today … just in 1979 ……
I wonder if the continued rise of the two-income/single household during that time also played into it. I personally don’t like shopping online unless it can be guaranteed delivered by the USPS because the other places will make you drive to their pickup location or just drop it off on your porch. Whereas if you had a stay-at-home member of the household there to take delivery that would make shopping by mail less worrisome. I avoid shopping for physical items online myself unless it is something I can’t get elsewhere (tickets and reservations, on the other hand, feel weird to not purchase online these days.)
Given life in the suburbs, it still feels right to go to an enclosed mall than other physical locations. Downtown parking is a pain and there is still less selection than at a mall. Driving around to different strip malls is even worse. And it is the rare strip mall experience that finds one able to walk to a restaurant in clement weather and without having to navigating the parking lot. It would be another story if I lived in a downtown area where I could walk or take a subway home, then individual stores would be great.
So on the whole, I think replacing the motor is a last resort.