Did you ever think that Donald Nelson’s war experience may have influenced Craftsman’s change from New Britain to Plomb?
With respect to the latter part of your question, we've had this conversation before. New Britain was not a sole supplier. Sears, Roebuck, & Company had already briefly bought some socket drive wrenches and tools from Snap-on in the prewar period, and had also been already using S-K as well. So, there was no change from New Britain to Plomb. Plomb was an additional supplier. There was an overlap. In the late 40's, NB, S-K, and Plomb were all supplying drive tools at the same time. And, it is important to note that they had a fourth supplier for end wrenches during that entire prewar to wartime to postwar span. As I have said in the past, it looks to me like Sears making a decision in 1947-ish/8 to more or less centralize or sole-source their Craftsman production on Moore Drop Forge for all socket drive wrenches
and end wrenches seems to be a lessons learned from decades of juggling multiple suppliers for those items. In a separate discussion on the Long C thread, GearWolf has concurred with me on that, which gave no small amount of confidence to my independent thoughts o the matter.
Now, going back to the first part of your question, was
that centralizing/sole-sourcing many-to-one decision influenced by Donald Nelson's tenure as the Chairman of the War Production Board during WWII?
That's a great question. I would have to say almost certainly to some degree. As you know, he was chosen by FDR for his experience overseeing the acquisition of over 130,000 different products at the helm of Sears. FDR saw a model there for what he wanted to do. The magnitude, scale, and scope of the acquisitions he oversaw at the WPB during WWII dwarfed that in comparison, of course. And he was criticized for making many missteps at the WPB, the main theme of which could be argued falling into the category of multiplicity.
But I don't know how much of that affected what was going on in the Craftsman hand tools sector after the war, specifically. I'm not even sure when he returned to Sears. He took all of 1946 to write
Arsenal of Democracy. Maybe a re-read is in order!
