I have a DeWalt 12V cordless drill-driver, that I’ve been using for quite a few years now. I have two battery packs for it, but they are both just about dead. They barely hold any charge now.<\/p>\n
I went to Home Depot today to buy a pair of replacement battery packs. $94 each. $180 for a pair. Preposterous. How preposterous? For $120, I could instead buy a brand new DeWalt 12V cordless drill, complete with hard plastic case, battery charger, and two battery packs<\/em>. What is going on here?<\/p>\n So, I bought the new drill. Seems stupid, but there it is. I don’t need the new drill, don’t want the new drill, but I bought it anyway because of their lame-brained pricing. DeWalt could have made even more profit from me, if they were willing to sell me just a pair of batteries for marginally less than they ask for two batteries and a drill. Perhaps we could have split the difference on the cost of the new drill I didn’t want, a win-win scenario. But no. There’s fair and reasonable profit… and then there’s gouging… and then there’s gouging taken to an absurd and self-defeating extreme.<\/p>\n I was thinking better of my purchase, thought I might return it and instead buy a drill from somebody else. Somebody smarter. It is our moral duty as consumers to punish this kind of crap. But a quick look around the marketplace reveals that all the major power tool manufacturers are doing it.<\/p>\n Personally, I think this sort of thing should be illegal. It should be illegal to sell a watch battery for more than the cost of new watch (which includes a battery). It should be be illegal to sell an ink cartridge for more than the cost of a new inkjet printer. And it should be illegal to sell two cordless drill battery packs for more than the cost of a cordless drill, case, charger, and two batter packs.<\/p>\n With landfills filling up with useless packaging and unrepairable, unrecyclable, pollution-causing discarded electronics, with natural resources being depleted at an ever-increasing rate, with the government recommending a maximum safe consumption of freshwater fish (due to heavy metal pollutants), perpetrating this kind of shit just makes no sense at all. It should be illegal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a DeWalt 12V cordless drill-driver, that I’ve been using for quite a few years now. I have two battery packs for it, but they are both just about dead. They barely hold any charge now. I went to Home Depot today to buy a pair of replacement battery packs. $94 each. $180 for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thegatesofdawn.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}