re: How did mowers become as expensive as a used car while becoming terrible?

My mom's husband use to own an appliance shop. They sold everything from TVs to lawn equipment. He told me he didn't make much money when he sold a lawnmower, he made it on the parts.

Is the brand you bought a public company? I don't know much about companies that sell lawn equipment, but if there is a private company out there, I would buy that brand.

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tune out for a couple of hours.

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A couple of hours on a riding mower?

Do you own a damn farm?

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If your blade belt smoked then your deck is probably clogged with wet grass or a small animal.

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I have to admit, I've never considered whether a company was public, before making lawn care purchases.

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because it makes zero fricking sense and only a total fricking retard would care

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A couple of hours on a riding mower?

Do you own a damn farm?

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Yes. 4 hours a weekend between my two properties on mowing alone. Bushogging takes about 4- 5 hours more. Throw in spraying Roundup or MSM and you can kill a whole weekend just doing grass work.

1. Could be grass or something caught between the guards and pulley to break a belt. Usually it is wet grass or stick stuck between guard and pulley.

2. One pulley or spindle could be bad which throws a belt before breaking a belt.
(usually you would have heard a bearing starting to go out and had some sort of warning)

I am sorry this has happened to you unfortunatley it happens. I do sell mowers and service alot of mowers from commercial robot mowers for golf courses down to the $899 consumer mowers. I seen it happen on brand new mowers all the way to 10 yr old mowers.

This is stupid as you have public and private companies in the industry to make good models and poorly built models. Bigger players have deep pockets and will be around for many years to come as they have snow blowers or other divisions which offset mower sales.

Biggest thing is how much captial do they have to survive.

This year is an off season where the industry is down on avg 6%. MTD, a privately held by the same family that started it in 1933 making auto parts. They are still in very good shape being a world wide leader in the industry they also build snow blowers and big in robot mowers in europe. Their campus alone in Cleveland is bigger than LSU's Baton Rouge Campus and alot nicer. Husqvarna, a worldwide public company still got deep pockets also having snow blowers along with robot mowers in Europe.

One company is privatley owned MTD and Husqvarana is publicaly owned. They both have deep pockets to weather the bad years. These companies are not going anywhere during this down period. They can support what they sell in parts and service for many years to come. Toro, also a publically held company and has deep pockets to be around along time.

The smaller regional companies do not have the deep pockets (Bad Boy,Dixie Chopper, Hustler,Bad Dog etc). This is a great example Snapper could not pay briggs a few years back and briggs took on snapper. This happens all them time with them smaller guys that do not have deep pockets. Scag actually came to MTD a few years back to see if they wanted to buy them. These companies can take a bad year or two. Now on third year can they survive being a one horse pony just selling mowers?

As far as margins the money is not in selling the mowers. The money is in servicing and parts. I own 4 hardware stores and we carry mowers just to get the service. We have 4 buildings offsite that does extended warranty service for big box store extended warranty companies. Alone I make alot more profit with alot less inventory than I do on the hardware stores.

I know a guy in Texas that has a warehouse, two or three trucks to pickup mowers from stores, and a few mechanics. The guy has very low overhead and avg's in profit $150k to $300k a month during the spring, summer, and fall. I do more than him in profit as I have more service centers with less competition and in snow markets which keep me busy in the winter months.

I have a Scott's S2554 riding mower. 12 years old with one magnetic clutch replacement and only regular maintenance over that. Pleased to say the least.

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This is stupid as you have public and private companies in the industry to make good models and poorly built models

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I don't know anything about snowblowers. Do they have as much maintenance as lawn mowers?

What has a larger profit percentage? A lawn mower or the parts for a lawn mower? The answer is the parts. If a company has sold close to the same amount of lawn mowers for the past 4 or 5 years and they need a way to increase their profits, you are saying it is not in their best interest to use cheaper parts, which will result in more maintenance, which increases the sales of parts?

When my family sold my grandparent's house and property, they still had a refrigerator running that was purchased in the early 50s. It had been working for almost 60 years. I hear people talking about having to buy new refrigerators after 8-10 years. One of my family members bought a refrigerator that broke about a month after the warrenty was up. When they guy from Best Buy came out, the quote he gave to fix it was a little over $100 less than it cost to buy a new one.

You don't increase sales by building a product that people will only have to buy once in their lifetime.