On the bright side, due to how the Power Tool industry works, that Craftsman is in many cases the previous gen Dewalt for 1/3 the price. Others are Porter Cable in red and without a sales rep. I’m tied to Ryobi batteries but I happily pick up Craftsman corded tools when those are an option.

Lol, yeah, if you Google “who owns which power tool brands” you can find the Rosetta Stone of tool brands to figure out which cheaper brands come from the same factories as the expensive stuff. It’s a web of deception for sure.

Have you tried the GE Big Boys series of appliances? They look built like tanks.

I don't doubt there are plenty of experiences that went the wrong way, but wanted to share an alternative anecdote that went well.

I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.

IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.

Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.

You actually bought a Haier dishwasher with a GE sticker on it.

It’s hard to tell these days whether you’re buying a product from a brand you trust or from a company that bought the brand you trust.

Though, having said that, I recently bought a Bosch refrigerator because Bosch is still Bosch and I trusted Bosch.

But the refrigerator is crap, broken on arrival and it took 5 phone calls and 3 weeks to get service.

In Haier's case they bought way more than "just" the GE sticker. Haier is still using factories built by GE Appliances for many of their GE branded appliances and in many cases using the same people/processes/pipelines as before.

There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.

Good point. I forgot about the Haier acquisition.

While I was pleased with this particular purchase, my ability to trust any brand in general has been diminishing with age and each new betrayal of that trust.

I have a growing heuristic that is (at least in part) inversely related to number of employees and the time a company has been publicly traded.