Something always happens when you go on vacation. LOL
These low end brands don't make money, for ANYONE, and there's no point in being involved with them. And while there are no margins with this stuff, the cost of warranty administration and parts support still has to be in place. They still have to pay people to build this junk, they still have to put it in a box and ship it, pay for EPA certification. Most of those back end costs are reasonble constant and have to be suported on some item with $30 of profit in it? The stuff is garbage, yet no matter how cheap something is, buyers still expect it to work.
IMO............ Husky needs to get rid of the notion that they need to have a presence in every single segment in the industry, so shedding these brands is a good step in that direction. The other thing going on here is that the entry level hand held market is rapidly converting over to battery products. There is certainly no growth at all in store for wild things and weedeater. Makes sense for the occasional user to go battery, as they are constantly frustrated with low end consumer equipment that never starts when they need it.
The Craftsman story goes like this: Even near the end there was a lot of business there for Husky, but they walked away from that arrangement somewhat cleverly. One of the reasons they originally had most of it was that they extended generous 90 day terms to Sears. And at any time there might be close to $100 million dollars "out there". Now we all know what direction Sears has been going, and Husky wisely shortened those terms to 30 days to limit their exposure. So in walks MTD to fill the void, and MTD guys were crowing that they "got that business away from Husky" Guess they forgot that they lost 20 some million when Montgomery-Ward folded a few years back. LOL Good luck to them.
Mike generously sent me a few articles on this that I can't read here at home on dialup. I'll have more details on this that I'll share when i can. All of this who services what talk is comical. The corporates have very little control, in fact essentially NONE as to how competently a dealers supports the product. Stocking parts, qualified techs. Husky, Stihl, Echo and such all have every possible resource in place to enable dealers to do a good job. But they can't force dealers to get their act together.
But they aren't going to cancel dealers who can't figure it out, cause they'd have to axe 75% of the dealers in the country. For the most part Husky and Stihl themselves are mostly to blame for this situation IMO. The reason is that they saturate the market by opening up dealer after dealer. There are too many of each in any given market, and you can't cultivate strong, quality dealers with that approach.
