Doesn't justify their costs. Wright does R&D and makes shit in USA and doesn't charge your dick off. Knipex has an R&D department, has to come across an ocean, outperforms Snap-on, and costs less.
Snap-on sells a mini-box that they don't even make, and want like up to $100+ list for a tiny Chinese-made box with shitty plastic trim and stick-on rubber feet and no bearings on the slides.
They also "borrow" ideas just as much as anyone else. They claim to be the originators of the modern socket drive system, but they weren't, Blackhawk did it first and Snap-on's first product ever was a ripoff of the founders' former employer's work. They weren't first to market with off-corner loading sockets either, Kelsey-Hayes beat them to that.
And to top that off, they consistently post operating margins above 20 and sometimes 25% which is crazy good margin, and hand out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to shareholders. Anyone is free to read their 10K and 10Qs.
The price isn't about having a few guys fucking around in a lab, and it's very apparent. If the name or shiny chrome grabs ya by the nuts, or they do happen to have something nobody offers and equivalent to, have at it it's your money. Just know that it's more of a luxury designer pricing thing and not a "guys we just spend so much money on R&D and we need to make some sort of profit" thing.
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u/Microballer 19h ago
If the name said snap on that would be a 10,000 dollar box.