I told ya I'd drive home a PRO over this! 2 cylinders failed leak down test. Only 16K miles.

You then have to ask yourself why Walmart and Target survived and thrived. Sears/Kmart didn’t evolve the business with changing times and got left behind. Competition from Amazon was certainly a piece of the pie but there were lots of other reasons. Sears/Kmart has become a case study for lots of MBAs and a lot’s been written on it. It’s pretty interesting reading.

 

Ya I was under the impression that sear/kmart were to "niche", walmart/target lived because they appealed to broader demographics. Plus bought have a grocery side of the business and ordering grocery's online still hasn't taken off in a big way.

 

I don't disagree with you that it's not exactly a great comparison. Toyota not having a failure to modernize just gave me a chuckle, and I had to jump on it.

Though I will say Toyota has been treading on brand reputation a bit for the past few years, and that is not a good path to start down. Hopefully it's not a long term trend, because that type of complacency is where the end begins.

 

I think that other than complete groceries, if you walked into a Kmart they had most of the same product categories that a Walmart does. A smaller store though but still a big box.

Sears became niche more recently, but remember that at one time they were all sprawling department stores. Only later on when the brand was already going downhill did they shrink to only appliance, lawn care/mowers, and tools.

Locally, we used to have a huge Sears, which closed completely and moved into a building a tenth of the size about 5 years before they finally shut down. We also had a Kmart that was never a pleasant place to be inside of. It was just nasty.

 

?

I guess the question is, what modernization did walmart do the those other stores didn't? I've going to walmart for 20 years, still seems about the same, they have a website now, but so did sears. So whats the difference? Kind of interesting that Amazon destroyed sears, when amazon is basically a modern version of the catalog model that got sears rich in the first place.

 

They refresh their stores regularly. And the Sears/Kmart online interface was always awful.

Walmart beat out Sears mainly because they went the discount route. Going back to my original post on this, the actual value of wages has dropped for those in the lower end of the income bracket. That’s one big reason Sears lost out. But if you had to choose between shopping for a discount item at Kmart or Walmart, Walmart was much more attractive. Relatively speaking of course.

 

I don't mind that they are utilitarian. My SR5 has just about everything i need in a truck. Other than the bed mat, seat jackes, and tailgate lock, all of my other mods were "wants" not "needs".

 

Yeah same here. The few things that might be missing or that I’d change are nowhere near dealbreakers.

The number 1 feature of this truck is it’s given me almost 80K completely trouble-free miles.

 

Exactly. They know a certain segment of buyers will buy anything that says "Toyota" on it, regardless of actual quality vs perceived quality. IMHO, the perceived quality is definitely higher than the actual quality, and has been for several years.

 

I have been saying this about HONDA for years, since like 1998 actually.

 

And yet Toyota and Lexus still lead pretty much every reliability chart.

 

UPDATE.
Just got a call from my Service Rep Britany. Truck is ready to be picked up. No issues found overnight.
I'll have her walk the truck with me before I leave.

 

About the only thing that I'd like to have had is the blind spot sensor. I have spot mirrors which work okay, but the blind spot sensors would be nice. It's still odd to me what they include and what they don't include in various levels of Tacomas.

No directions in the mirrors and not even the wiring. No blind spot sensors.

Toyota used to use one basic harness for each model and that made it easy to add options. Even in my Daughter in Laws 2014 Camry, it was simple to add the back up camera because everything was there except the camera and the harness to the connector in the center console.

 

Hondas are nice, but I've always thought that they are ovrpriced for what they are. We had a brand new Accord rental on a trip to Hawaii several years ago. Brand new as in we were the first renters. Beautiful car, but it didn't do a think that a Camry would do. I looked up prices later on and saw that the Accord was a couple thousand more for the same trim level in a Camry.

Even their snowblowers are overpriced for what they are. Great engines, but the rest of the machine is just okay.

 

I’m just north of you in Oak Ridge, was the dealership Vann York or Rice? Seems like they handled it well.

 

No update for a while. Did the OP perish in a firey engine catastrophe?

 

I would rather chew my own balls off than to have to use Honda push mower. They handle poorly and have needlessly complicated controls. A Honda engine on someone else's deck I could live with if I had too....but not the whole mower.

 

Same happened to my son with a Hyundai.

 

I had an old Briggs and Stratton Yardman mower that I had to repair or weld the frame on three times. It went 19 seasons in Texas. I kept telling myself that the first time I couldn’t get it to start when the season started, I was going to upgrade to a wider deck. That damn thing started every year. And after the first mow, would start damn near every time on the first pull. I’m not kidding, it Just. Wouldn’t. Die.

I think I changed the oil and plugs in it like twice. Maybe.

Finally, one of the wheel mounts cracked again and I had to drag it across the yard in big sweeping circles so I donated it to the pile when I upgraded to a cub cadet double wide.

 

My neighbor seems to like his.