House brand vs distributed brand, where my money goes

I'll be honest, I see ads for brands like Kobalt, Hercules, Flex, Masterforce, and many others.  Generally speaking, I won't buy them.

Why not?  Because those are all "house brands".  They are brands that you can only get at one store or franchise.  "Flex" and "Kobalt" belong to Lowes.  "Husky" belongs to Home Depot, "Masterforce" belongs to Menards.  The common trait among them is that you can only get those brands from their respective owner stores.

I got burned bad a long time ago by "Craftsman" and Sears.  Not because the "Craftsman" brand was bad.  They were great.  I loved Craftsman and there were Sears stores just about everywhere.  Then Sears started closing stores.

Soon, you were lucky if there was only a single Sears store in town or nearby and trying to get "Craftsman" tools, accessories, warranty help, etc.. became a nightmare.

Then Sears sold the "Craftsman" brand and it went down the toilet in quality faster than you could say "made in China".

Now, I am excessively leery about house brands.  I generally won't buy into them, especially where cordless, battery platform power tools are concerned.  Who knows how long a house brand will last until they decide to kill it off and not offer more or support what's out there already.

So personally, I stay as far away from house brands as I can.  I won't say that I won't buy a house brand at all.  Especially when talking about a one-off purchase.  The tool or accessory can stand alone and isn't dependent on long term support.  This generally keeps those purchases to "universal" applied things like bits, sockets, hand tools, etc...

I admit to having more than a fair share of Masterforce items like those I just described because Menards is far and away the closest and most accessible to me.

I've been tip-toeing around Craftsman tools again.  Especially their new V20 brushless line of cordless power tools.  Ive gotten the circular saw and quality seems to be improving and the lineup seems to be widening with more than just a few tools available.   I'm also gotten a Craftsman powered ratchet as a nut-runner for my work.  It's not brushless or the most powerful, but as I only intend to use it as a nut-runner in hard to access spaces (which seems to be happening more and more often) it doesn't have to be anything more.

Craftsman is no longer a house brand.  It's distributed and seems to be practically everywhere now.  Not actually but it's in a lot of places.  At least, a lot of places advertise they carry Craftsman but when you walk into the stores and they actually don't have any at all or shelf space for them, (I'm looking at you Westlake Ace) then it's just all talk.

But still plenty of other places are sticking them widely.  Even Lowes, which is far from my favorite big box store.  (It's actually my least favorite) but I can at least see the demo models even if the actual items are never in stock but perpetually "on order".

The only house brand I'd even considered for a powered ratchet is the Husky 12 volt from Home Depot.  Why? Because it operates as a stand-alone with a built in rechargeable battery instead of needing to buy into their house brand battery platform.  Otherwise, I wouldn't even look at it.

The nice thing about both brands is that I can purchase either of them my favorite way, online.  I hate walking through stores and shopping.  At the same time, I like to be able to get a feel for a tool in my own hands before I buy it if possible.  A veritable dillema to be sure.

I know lots of people who don't mind and even prefer some house brands.  That's fine for them, but I still can't bring myself to do it.

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