It's great having the option for cheap, low-quality stuff. If I need some oddball tool for a home improvement project then I can just buy the crap at Harbor Freight. If it breaks after a few uses then so what, I won't need it again anyway.
Exactly. I needed an angle grinder for one specific use. I bought the cheapest model from HF and then threw it in my garage to sit. 15 years later I needed it again. It did the job. No reason to buy the higher end model.
I did spend the extra to buy better quality wheels though.
I bought a screwdriver at Home Depot, and screw stripped the screwdriver! I returned it and bought the same type of screwdriver at Harbor Freight and it's been great.
The only product in Harbor Freight that I haven't liked so far, was their moving blankets - very thin.
What are you proposing as an alternative? Spend a fortune on a high quality tool, and then either have it sitting in my garage unused for years or waste a bunch of time trying to sell it online?
Tool rental is a thing (I don't imagine many people own their own cement mixer for example.)
I recall my grandfather having (decent) tools sitting in his garage. Neighbors/relatives often borrowed tools in those days.
To be a little more nuanced though, some tools don't benefit from "quality" versions. Perhaps an angle grinder is a good example. (The consumable grinding disk is probably the place not to cheap-out.) Maybe the cheap one is fine.
But other tools, like a wood plane, you're going to have a bad time if you cheap out on those and wind up with steel that doesn't hold an edge for example.
(Though I kind of wouldn't want to loan out a nice hand plane of mine to someone that might not worry as much as me about hitting a nail in a board they're planing.)
Tool rental is barely a thing. And then only for larger tools. I've done that before for larger items like extension ladders and air compressors but for smaller stuff no one actually rents those. If I need to plane one piece of wood then I'll buy the cheap tool. Good enough.
Borrow, rent, pay someone else to do it, or throw your hands up in the air when you've tried nothing, are all out of ideas, and fuck the externalities.
No one rents those oddball little tools and my neighbors don't have them either. Do you have an actual useful suggestion or are you going to stick with the virtue signaling?
