Wednesday, September 25, 2019

EULA's Versus Crafstman Tools

Back in the 70's and 80's a large portion of Sears stores were dedicated to Craftsman tools. It was the "cool" part of the store for boys. Once you got done with the boring mall trip for clothes, you could browse the aisles and look at all the shiny wrenches and socket sets, garden tractors and snowblowers. I bought my first big set of socket wrenches and other tools from the Sears store I went to as a kid a few years before they closed the whole thing down.

Craftsman tools, of course, had the famous lifetime guarantee. If you broke a wrench, they'd just replace it at the store for no charge, no questions asked. You didn't have to sign a pile of paperwork to join the program, or go online and register your phone number and email so you'd get spam everyday. The broken tool said "CRAFTSMAN" and they'd replace it--even if it was 15 years old. It was that easy.

Contrast that with the tech world today. Every shitty little useless app you want to install on your phone comes with a multi-page contract about how the fags at the company that made the app plan to abuse you. I don't mean "fag" as in homosexual, but fag in the middle school pejoritive sense of the word, which is appropriate to tech companies today.

They're almost all asshole companies that are scamming and scheming to abuse their "customers", from the giant Facebergs down to the rattiest little app company. The truly bizarre thing is they provide almost no value to anyone compared to Craftsman. I have an old POS Craftsman lawn tractor, probably from the 1980s that I use to mow our lawn and haul stuff around our property. I use and abuse that thing and it still runs without a hitch. My stupid smartphone has more problems after a few years than a nearly 40 year old tractor with many moving parts that's used constantly for things it was never designed to do.

No comments:

Post a Comment