Yeah I remember seeing a story about
A farmer who had purchased a new John Deere tractor and it stopped leaving him stuck out in a field somewhere. Not easy to push your tractor back to the barn! He couldn't get the software J.D. as it wasn't available to the owners. He was used to maintaining his own equipment, always had. Long story short, he sold it and got his hands on an older tractor and said after the crap he went through with J.D. he was through with them. He felt betrayed. So how is this a good thing? Also when big box stores contract with well known brands and order up huge amounts of a product, say 50,000 hot water heaters ,but only if they can get them at a certain price point. If the deal goes down, the supplier most likely will have to cut quality or something just to stay within their margin. This is never a good thing for us, the consumer. Especially when it's a brand you've known and trusted and has always had a good product. Yet you can still get the quality your used to from a smaller dealer, you'll pay more to get what you thought you were getting at the big box stores. Someone placed two J.D. tractor mowers side by side, one from a dealer store and one from H.Depot and they looked the same at first. Closer inspection, one had a metal seat, the other plastic. The motors were from different manufacturers, on and on and the kicker is in this case the prices to the buyer weren't all that different, but the quality difference became very obvious.What a scam to the unsuspecting customer. Buyer beware. H.D. had to recall or their supplier had to recall thousands of h.water heaters. They hadn't even been inspected before shipping. They had been sourced out to another company in Mexico and others manufacturers with shady pasts. "Brand loyalty" doesn't mean to me what it did to past generations of buyers, it's not the same in many ways now.
