I can't speak for him but I have both the slip joint and the plain needle nose and both are much better than anything else I've had. One thing I see commonly about the SO pliers that it seems most miss, the teeth last much longer than cheaper brands, at least in my experience.
What happened to Snap-On Trucks?
- Thread starter Escape08
- Start date
Hermann
Site Donor 2023
Saw a Matco truck 2 days ago.
I see Snap On trucks around here all of the time but none of the other main players such as Matco or Cornwell. The only Snap On stuff I have is some of their pliers.
How many have you known?
IME the same people who make dumb financial choices everywhere else will make them on the tool truck. The ones who are financially prudent with the rest of their lives will be with their tool purchases. And yes, I’ve had that coworker who fell for every buy this get a free “insert random item with Snap On logo here” paying with it all through Snap On credit. Those are the same guys that say things like “you can live in a car but can’t drive a house” though.
25 years ago buying a franchise was a worthy endeavor. A guy could buy a house and send kids to school.
I knew a couple of these guys.
Snap On in their greed to grow the franchises divided territories and regions into dime sized slices, overlap and fighting happened.
Online sales started taking a chunk out of the route guys.
Online sales started exposing everyone to the worlds premier vendors reducing Snap Ons "mystique" as the best in the world.
When a guy with a snap on budget started getting their hands on - Hazet, Facom, Stahwhile, Cornwell, Koken, Nepros they started liking what they saw felt and experienced.
The only guys making money are the guys with the long established good routes that will hold onto them till they day they die.
I took CKN’s post to mean tool owners not franchise owners. I would agree that the franchise owners have a tough row to hoe these days. I looked into purchasing a route a few years back. The only way it would have made sense for me was if I’d have been prior military as corporate went 50/50 with new franchisees on start up costs if they were prior military. In my very amateur calculations I planned on working it for 3-5 years just to recoup the intial investments.
Interesting assessment of owners.
I've seen a few like you mention where a guy goes all in and gets in debt to them and only ever had mediocre skills to start with.
I no longer see all snap on boxes anywhere.
The vast majority I see now are successful talented guys that know exactly what they want from whom, and have mixed boxes filled with the best from round the world.
If you were able to remove the brand names off of both lines of tools and lay them out on a table in front of me, I would gather up all the blank unbranded Snap-on tools and take them with me. I'm actually quite thankful for my ability to spot fake tools. When I go to Harbor Freight, I walk past all the fake tools and go straight to the chemical isle to grab a can WD-40 Specialist Dry. No other place in town keeps it in stock as well as Harbor Freight.
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Fake tools? Yeah ok, I get it that opinions differ so I respect that but calling a quality tool such as the ICON line up fake is not warranted. SNAP ON will probably continue to fade away as equal quality tools are available for much less money elsewhere and don't require the tool truck to rape you every week with payments. I like my snap on tools I have, just over 30+ years I got wiser and realize they were not a best investment for me. I never financed my tools but I have other shop owner friends in 1000's of dollars in debt to snap on and for what? That hurts their income potential and honestly even a Pittsburg tool will last well enough in most shops and if they break go same day and get a warranty replacement instead of waiting for the tool truck. Heck you can keep 2 or 3 laying around if they break. You can make money using tools - and waste money buying them.
Are you telling me you own Snap-on Tools already and you consider ICON to be equivalent? That tells me right there your definition of quality is far different from mine. I've used tools long enough to know there is a MASSIVE difference in quality between Snap-on and reversed engineered fake tools. No offense intended.
No offense taken. Like I said it's just opinions.
GON
$100 Site Donor 2024
At least where I was at, the shop supplied the boxes. Some were roll style and some were like cabinets with a countertop. Pretty good deal for the techs IMO.
Shop supplied boxes are a double edged sword. Most techs that are past entry level have a toolbox so if the shop supplies or has built ins for aesthetics, now the tech has to load his or her tools into the shop box, hope they all fit, and then either find someplace to store the box, the shop stores the box somewhere, or the tech sells the box and winds up scrambling for another box if/when he or she changes job. Add to that when a tech has been doing this for a period of time, you get everything laid out in a way that makes sense to you and is organized how you like it, now you have to change everything to fit a box layout that you have no say in which is annoying. I dont like how my Dad has his toolbox arranged but it makes sense to him. He doesnt like how mine is arranged but it makes sense to me.
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- Jun 3, 2021
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I'm not sure if this varies by franchisee or not, but I've heard some formerly loyal Snap-on users say they stopped buying because the warranty got worse, so the element of service (truck showing up and swapping your broken tool for a new one without issue) that they expected was taken away and the price no longer made sense just for the tools alone.
I'll echo what others have said. Cheaper alternatives like the HF Icon line, Tekton, Gearwrench, Sunex, etc have taken a huge bite out of Snap-on and MAC for offering competitive enough alternatives for half the price. And that's just for hand tools. With the toolbox market, is anybody paying $10,000+ for a Macsimizer anymore? There are more large toolbox options than ever before, and many of them are very nice and for a fraction of the price of a tool truck box. I can't imagine Snap-on/MAC/Matco sell nearly as many boxes today as they did 15 years ago.
