Memorial Day Tool Sales and the Quiet Automation Gap Nobody's Talking About
Home Depot's pushing DeWalt deals while the factories making those tools are running skeleton crews of robots. Something doesn't add up.
Image credit: Lottie animation by Centre Robotics (LottieFiles Free, used with credit). · source
I'm scrolling through ZDNet's roundup of Memorial Day power tool deals this morning, coffee in hand, and I keep thinking about a conversation I had with a guy named Werner back in 2019. He ran a production line outside Stuttgart that made drill housings. Not the fancy bits, just the plastic shells. His line had maybe forty workers when I visited in 2015. By 2019, he was down to twelve.
Now Home Depot and Lowe's are advertising up to $400 off DeWalt and Milwaukee tools, and I'm wondering: who's building these things now?
The Deals Are Real, the Context Is Missing
Look, I'm not here to tell you whether a $279 Milwaukee impact driver is worth it. Probably is. These Memorial Day sales have been a fixture for decades, and the discounts this year seem genuine. DeWalt's running promotions, Milwaukee's doing their usual "buy a kit, get a battery free" thing. Standard stuff.
But here's what caught my attention. The consumer side of power tools is basically, well, unchanged in how it reaches you. Big box stores, seasonal sales, guys in orange aprons. Meanwhile the manufacturing side has transformed completely in the past eight years. And nobody writing these deal roundups seems to notice or care.
What I Know From the Inside
When I was at Kuka, we sold cells to three of the major power tool manufacturers. Can't say which ones (NDAs don't expire just because I'm retired). But I can tell you that the assembly lines I saw in 2012 versus what my old colleague Frank described to me last year, it's not even the same industry.
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