My apologies, I should have better clarified my question.
I am well aware of the history of Craftsman and when they began outsourcing specific items, so I wasn’t requesting a history lesson. My knowledge of this topic is vast.
Several months back, a few of the Ace Hardware stores near me completely emptied their shelves of new old stock Sears sourced Craftsman USA and China products for the SB&D sourced Craftsman products (I don’t care if the SKU’s are the same, I know they are). The shelves basically went from black or gray packaging to bright *** red all over the tool aisle... basically, the same Craftsman garbage that can currently be found inside of Lowe’s. Other Ace stores at the time didn’t switch over and still had plenty of Sears sourced Craftsman stock on the shelves, including Chinese made and a little bit of USA new old stock.
My question was... at this point in time (July 2020), have all Ace stores pretty much depleted their Sears/Craftsman sourced inventory in favor of the New Stanley B&D Craftsman? I was asking because I was out of town and had several Ace stores to hit up on my 400 mile drive home. This time last year, I found a lot of NOS USA socket sets and wrenches at Ace stores that had been collecting dust for years (probably been there more than a decade before the outsourcing began)... that’s not the case anymore now that everyone and their brother knows Ace sells Craftsman. It used to be a dirty little secret that they did sell Craftsman, but word got out. I found several USA impact socket sets still sitting on the shelves of two Ace stores this time last year and bought all of them for several hundred dollars. All sockets stamped “Made In USA” with the little American flag on the packaging label.
So what I found during my drive home were 5 Ace Hardware stores. The first store had no Craftsman hand tools, purely Milwaukee. The next two stores had all converted to nothing but SB&D Craftsman in that bright *** red packaging. The next two stores closer to home had a mixture of Sears sourced Craftsman (Made in China) and SB&D Craftsman.
So yes, it would appear that most of the new old stock USA and China Craftsman tools sourced by Sears have been mostly depleted from Ace Hardware stores in favor of SB&D Craftsman.
