[h2odragon]

Poorly designed, poorly manufactured, barely works in use and rounds the nuts you use it on so that subsequent attempts will be harder even with better tools.

It feels like there's been a strong Satanic / nihilistic philosophy at work among the hand tool industry for a while now. Started somewhere around the time period when the movie "Rambo" caused a fad for crappy "survival knives."

[lazide]

It’s a general shift economy wise from the post WW2/wartime ‘build it simple, build it tough’ to optimizing to cheaper and cheaper price points (while maximizing profit) while ‘still works’.

Part of it I think is that most tool buyers now (statistically) are urban/suburban homeowners or renters which are not going to use it much, and are often not even capable of wearing out the old style tools. (And are not the proverbial 500 lb gorilla).

Industrial tools are still quite sturdy. They’re also far more expensive than any normal homeowner would (or should) ever consider.

It’s the market delivering what people will pay for, not what people say they want.

[aidenn0]

I think we are in a death spiral:

10 Some people buy cheap and/or gimmicky crap

20 This is observed by the industry so even some name brands (like Crescent) make cheap and/or gimmicky crap

30 People notice that even name-brands are making crap, so switch from shopping on brand to shopping on price

40 GOTO 10

[constantcrying]

This diseases has infected almost anything. Even many expensive product I see have obvious cut corners and great effort seems to have gone into making it connect to an app, which nobody in their right mind would want to use.

The sever decline in general product quality, together with an increase in unneeded complexity, is absolutely awful. You can go on amazon right now and for every product imaginable you can find many which are essentially just designed to be thrown into the trash in a couple of years, when with some actual effort the same thing could be made to last far longer.

It is easy to blame the buyers who "just cares about the cost", but I am not sure that tells the entire story. Surely there is a significant market segment of people willing to buy actual high quality products.

[waltbosz]

My ironic favorite are the cheap screw drivers that destroy themselves instead of stripping the mildly tight screw.

[bee_rider]

Clearly a feature, not a bug.

[waltbosz]

Hmm, I doubt it was a design decision. The only time I've experience this was from bargain bin screwdriver sets.