Archive for the ‘Tool King’ Category

OK, I men­tioned in one of the Retail Part­ner blurbs (to see a short descrip­tion of all our Retail Part­ners, click on the Retail Part­ners tab in the menu bar near the top of the page) the fact that I like refur­bished equip­ment. Here’s why.

Man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies do qual­ity con­trol inspec­tions on their prod­ucts before they ship them out. That’s a good thing for me and you, because no one wants to buy junk.

A poten­tial prob­lem with man­u­fac­tur­ers’ qual­ity con­trol is that many com­pa­nies make so many prod­ucts that they aren’t able to inspect each and every piece they pro­duce. Or if they do inspect them all, it’s just a cur­sory inspec­tion. For those who don’t inspect every prod­uct, often­times what they will do is per­form a thor­ough spot-check of a few parts ran­domly pulled off the assem­bly line.

OK, enough about inspec­tions and new mer­chan­dise. What about refurbs?

Peo­ple return mer­chan­dise for all kinds of rea­sons. Some­times it’s because the prod­uct didn’t work like it was sup­posed to, but a lot of times it’s because of issues that don’t have any­thing at all to do with the prod­uct being defec­tive in any way. Some prod­ucts are returned on account of buyer’s remorse, or because the buyer just got laid off from their job and can’t afford the prod­uct now, or because their wife found out they bought it and made them send it back. So a whole bunch of prod­ucts get sent back to the man­u­fac­turer for rea­sons that have noth­ing at all to do with prod­uct quality.

The man­u­fac­ture wants to resell all of their returned mer­chan­dise, but they have to inspect it first to make sure that it goes out in excel­lent con­di­tion. This means that EVERY piece of returned mer­chan­dise gets inspected — not just a ran­dom sam­pling of prod­ucts, like when the stuff was first shipped out to retail­ers. So Rea­son #1 for why I like refurbs is that they have been indi­vid­u­ally inspected at the factory.

Another prob­lem that manufacturer’s have with returned mer­chan­dise is that they can’t sell it as new, because it isn’t new. You’ve heard that as soon as you drive a new car out of the show­room it drops in value by about 25%. That’s because it can no longer be sold as new. It may be very lightly used, but it’s used nonethe­less. So that takes me to Rea­son #2 why I like refurbs — you get a nice dis­count on them.

What’s not to like about a nearly-new piece of equip­ment that has been indi­vid­u­ally fac­tory inspected and marked down in price?

As of this writ­ing, I have two Retail Part­ners that have a good selec­tion of refur­bished equip­ment. The first one can be found in the Com­put­ers / Elec­tron­ics sec­tion and is called Refurb Depot. Lots of stuff at good dis­counts, but it doesn’t last long because they don’t get many of any indi­vid­ual item, so if you see some­thing you like, you bet­ter jump on it.

The other good refurb dealer is found in our Tools / Hard­ware / Auto­mo­tive sec­tion. The ven­dor is called Tool King. They have a really nice sec­tion of returned and refur­bished tools from a lot of major man­u­fac­tur­ers. If you want a high-quality brand name tool, but you don’t want to spend top dol­lar for it, this is the place to shop.

You can thank me later.