TTI bought Milwaukee in 2005, invested $206M in R&D annually, and grew it to $8B revenue; Stanley Black & Decker bought Craftsman for $900M, built a failed $90M factory, and now carries $6.1B in debt.
Key Takeaways
TTI kept Milwaukee’s Brookfield, WI engineering intact, launched M12/M18, FUEL brushless, ONE-KEY, and PACKOUT, expanding US headcount from 300 to 5,900.
SBD’s Craftsman Fort Worth factory produced misshapen ratchets and unstamped sockets before shutting down in 2023 with 175 workers instead of the promised 500.
Porter-Cable, founded 1906 and Smithsonian-collected, was gutted post-acquisition: internals cheapened, service centers closed within six months, router line discontinued.
SBD closed its Stanley founding-city factory in New Britain, CT in February 2026, citing “structural decline” in single-sided tape measures, eliminating 300 jobs.
TTI’s clean portfolio segmentation (Ryobi for DIY, Milwaukee for pros) prevented cannibalization; SBD’s brands competed on the same store shelves simultaneously.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters noted this dynamic extends well beyond tools: white goods, appliances, and consumer electronics follow the same consolidation-to-cheapening pattern with shared Chinese factories.
Style criticism surfaced: at least one commenter found the repeated subject-omitting sentence structure unreadable, raising questions about whether the piece was LLM-assisted.
No debate on the core thesis; the few comments treat TTI’s R&D reinvestment versus SBD’s cost-cutting as an obvious case study in acquisition strategy divergence.
Notable Comments
@analog8374: Arrow T50 stapler cited as a parallel case of quality collapse after a factory change, confirming the pattern outside power tools.
