Recommending automatics? Wtf?

General Discussion
141

@cwatkin
For what it’s worth, shortly after Snapper said “no” to W/M, the company started losing money, a lot of it, and wound up owing money to Briggs and Stratton that they could not repay. B+S ultimately purchased the brand name (in lieu of cash, I suppose) and today, the “Snapper” brand is simply a way for B+S to sell direct. You’ll see Snapper-brand mowers in big boxes of all kinds, including W/M.

And now, you know…the REST of the story!

(Actually, it was Murray that got acquired by B+S via bankruptcy…Snapper got bought by Simplicity, which got bought by B+S in 2005. I do not know the terms under which Simplicity bought Snapper, nor the terms that B+S bought Simplicity…though gut instinct is B+S wouldn’t buy unless it was a bargain. So: Correct that Snapper is now a subsidiary of B+S; correct that Snapper is for sale in Big Box stores; uncertain if Snapper was ever in dire financial straits as an independent company.)

142

Its like chicken and the egg. I don’t know which came first, the move to China or the pressure from Home Depot. But I do remember the closing of the Techumseh plant down south and selling all their fixtures and dies to China. That was the start of it. One of the best engines around and now they are called Liquid Combustion or something that most of the big boxes had on their floor until Briggs also sent work to China. The liquid combustions are cheap crud throw away for $100 mounted on reasonable equipment. I would never buy them which is why I went Toro. At any rate the weak link now is not the Briggs or Kohler engines but the cheapo hydraulic transmissions. The same transmission is on cheap mowers as well as $3000 mowers and can’t pull or stand hills.