Crappy tools from Lowe's and Home Depot

Lowe's is more guilty than Home Depot but HD is getting pretty bad these days. They have their 'house brands' which they will guarantee for life -- bring it back and they will replace it for free. This sounds OK at the outset but thinking about it, this means that I have to leave the jobsite, spend two hours and four gallons of gas doing the round-trip into town and then, at the end of the day, I am left with another crappy tool, identical to the first one. Bruce at No Looking Back has a list of examples and a nice rant:

Crappy Products du Jour
In no particular order...

1) Kobalt tile and glass drill bits
Had to run a line for an ice maker from behind a kitchen fridge, through a tiled floor to the copper water line in the basement below. I knew the bit I had was too small (not to mention, I had no idea where it was at the time), so I grabbed a set of these (similar bit here) of bits at my local Lowe's(tandards).

For the record, when making such purchases, I will always check to see where the product was made, and opt for the products made in the USA, or at least made in a free, western nation, the name of which doesn't rhyme with vagina.

Needless to say, 98.3% (by my estimates) of all the items for sale at Lowe's, including the aforementioned drill bits, do not come from such a place.

These things are junk. I couldn't get one hole in one tile before snapping the heads off of two of these bits in the process. The last time I bought a bit for ceramic tile, it was at a Home Depot about 10 years ago (a Dewalt bit, I think). That one bit made short work of every piece of tile I took it to.

Home Depot hasn't sunk to the house-brand silliness yet but the quality of their power tools has been suffering a noticeable decline over the last five years. Fortunately, we have this place in town: Hardware Sales as well as the parent office for this wonderful company: Grizzly Grizzly does import cheap Chinese junk but they also have the larger tools manufactured at an ISO-9000 factory in Taiwan and the difference in quality is palpable. Their hand machine tools from India are not bad either. Good stuff and nice to see other nations get their share of our trade balance... One comment to this post is especially telling:

Roland: I used to be employed by Delta and was enjoying my career until the parent corporation decided to take my side of the sales force and merge it with our sister company, Porter Cable. I took just a couple of years with Porter Cable before I said see you later and moved into medical sales.

Then three years after my departure, the parent corporation sold both the Porter Cable and Delta brands to none other than Black & Decker/DeWalt. They were notorious for having tools we competed against, yet had no solid advantages. I wonder if your grinder was purchased prior or after 2003? If after, chalk that product quality up to Black and Decker.

Doesn't surprise me a bit that they are all the same...