I grew up in Toughskin jeans and I have a pile of Craftsman hand tools & power tools that I have bought over the years, as well as a few that I inherited when my father died in 1989. I always loved the lifetime guarantee on the hand tools and that they were made in the USA.
Sears had a long & glorious run for about 100 years. I remember my father's Craftsman radial arm saw (probably 1950 or 1960s vintage) and his Ted Williams outboard motor from the same era. We still have a JC Higgins gun cleaning kit that my mother-in-law bought. I still use the Craftsman radial arm saw that I bought in the 1980s.
Then they started phasing out brands that had been their bread & butter (JC Higgins, Ted Williams, etc.), and bringing in cheaper stuff. Sears also abandoned some product lines altogether (guns & related items), perhaps in an effort to not offend their more liberal shoppers.
Walmart started taking a chunk of their business in the 1980s. The internet bit off another chunk in the 1990s. My mother-in-law's financial advisor told her to dump her Sears stock somewhere in the mid to late 1990s ... then came the KMart merger.
Probably the last time I was in a Sears store was about two years ago, when I was shopping for a new tablesaw to replace the Craftsman that had finally died on me. All I found was a bunch of imported stuff ... sadly, I resigned myself to a Made in Taiwan Bosch from Lowe's. Now, I love that Bosch, but I would love it more if it had labels that said "Craftsman" and "Made in USA".
Their best years? I honestly don't know. They were good until 15 or 20 years ago, but not at their peak anymore. I believe that they have been in a slow death spiral for probably 40 or 50 years, and the spiral is accelerating.
