I guess you would need to define kicking everyone's ass. In terms of rich promotions, absolutely. In terms of giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in free product, absolutely. Their strategy is super aggressive, but it is not sustainable. The consumer is definitely winning here, but they cannot operate the way they are forever. When you are ultimately giving away everything you devalue your own product offering and then customers always expect to pay a rock bottom price. The only way to sustain that after economies of scale is reduce the quality of your product which is happening as we speak. The percentage of tools that are defective or need repair from what they manufacture are double ours. The fit and finish of their product looks cheap, it's like that paint job on a car that looks good from 30 feet away, but get up close and not so much.
They definitely do some things really well and have niche product offerings, they are super quick to market with product. They have always done mechanical/electrical/plumbing better than us, you can throw lighting in there too. When it comes to carpentry and concrete work, their tools do not hold a candle to ours. Our battery tech is way better. Milwaukee said they would never develop a battery platform outside of their 18V line and then they hit a wall with the 18V technology. Now they have this 80V system with ridiculously sized batteries and subpar performing tools that can't integrate with their current 18V system.
