Briggs & Stratton executives decided the business “has not met our profitability targets” despite attempts to achieve “a reasonable financial return,” Redman said. The company is committed to supporting its retail customers this spring and is targeting an exit from the business in early summer, he said.7 Jan 2022
WTF
As usual, context is everything:
The products are made in Asia and the Germantown facility distributes the product categories the Wauwatosa-based company is exiting, spokeswoman Lauren Vagnini told the Milwaukee Business Journal on Friday.
A small number of hourly employees in Germantown will be impacted and they will go through a bumping process under their labor union’s contract for hourly positions open at Briggs' other Milwaukee-area facilities, she said.
...
Harold Redman, Briggs & Stratton senior vice president of turf and consumer products, sent a memo to employees Friday informing them of the management team’s decision for what it calls its home maintenance business in North America. A copy of the letter was attained by Business Journal news partner WTMJ-TV (TMJ4).
Briggs & Stratton executives decided the business “has not met our profitability targets” despite attempts to achieve “a reasonable financial return,” Redman said. The company is committed to supporting its retail customers this spring and is targeting an exit from the business in early summer, he said.
“Despite the clear business rationale, decisions like this are difficult, especially when they impact good employees,” Redman said.KPS Capital Partners of New York City acquired Briggs & Stratton in September 2020 after the Wauwatosa company filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in July 2020."
Also:
...
“We are NOT just an engine company,” he said. “We are a power-agnostic products and technology company and we are building a foundation to ensure we are a sustainable and valuable company for the long term.”Among the one-year accomplishments Andrews listed:
• Aggressively leaning into electrification including acquiring an equity stake in Accelerated Systems, Inc. of Waterloo, Ontario, which provides Briggs with the capabilities necessary to significantly accelerate its electrification strategy;"etc etc
Which business. I'd have thought garden machinery was very profitable. Maybe they decided to make trampolines or sex toys or something. Brian
Possibly they see the writing on the wall for petrol engines in lawn mowers with more cordless electric models appearing in the marketplace.
They're banned in California after 2024, and generators from 2028:
Gonna be fun to see people cutting 4 acres of grass with a cordless when there is no electricity in the California grid...
I'm going to be having some very weird dreams tonight about two-stroke and four-stroke sex toys ;-)
Even with a good electricity supply to recharge batteries, a battery-powered lawnmower is going to be fun if you have an acre of grass to cut - unless you buy lots of batteries and use them in succession: use one while another is recharging. When we bought a chainsaw, strimmer and hedge trimmer, we chose ones made by Black and Decker which all use the same make of battery, so we have three batteries to use in rotation: use one, second one is waiting to cool down so it will start charging, third is charging. I remember in the 1970s my grandpa bought a cylinder lawn mower which was powered by a lead-acid car battery. He quickly realised that it was a pain because he could only get half of their fairly small lawn cut before he had to stop for a few hours while the battery recharged. So he bought a mains-powered hover mower instead, and sold the battery one.
Banning generators is a real problem, because if the power fails, you need
*some* way of generating your own power if you want to keep essential appliances like freezers running. Solar panels or wind turbines are fine as long as it is sunny/windy when the power goes off, but without some means of storing power, you can't keep things going if the power cut is at night or when it's so windy that it's not safe to run the turbine. That's when a genny comes into its own.I can understand them banning noisy, smelly two-stroke engines which rev very quickly and make an infernal racket, and insist on slower-reving, non oil-burning four-stroke instead. I'd like to see that done over here - with a long transition period so people can continue to use a 2-stroke appliance/motorbike until it dies, but insist that once it does, it must be replaced with 4-stroke. The problem with 2-stroke devices is that people don't even run them at constant (high) revs: I find a constant-pitch noise less intrusive than one which is up and down and all over the place from one second to the next.
California is in a 10-year drought. Grass only grows if irrigated.
Keep off thoughts of Wankel engines then
Then you don't understand at all. A 2-stroke is crudely put twice the power of a 4 stroke for the same cc and rpm. power to weight is everything with hand held tools
In message <t7vnq9$16ln$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>, at 16:26:01 on Fri, 10 Jun
2022, Andrew snipped-for-privacy@mybt>> >>>> >>>>> Which business. I'd have thought garden machinery was very profitable.Back in the day you could tell which episodes of "Dallas" had been shot in Hollywood rather than South Fork (Plano) and Dallas. The latter had brown grass, the former green.
I wouldn't say she was butch but she had a 2 stroke vibratos
There's a way around that:
California has quite a biodiversity in terms of grasses or sedges.
When you're up in the hills, what you're seeing is a natural colouration.
It was like that before the ten year drought (when I was out there). And my guide corrected me, on the colour thing. That the brown in the hills was normal.
And if you can't have a normal lawn, that paint-on lawn is great. Saves a lot of work. Who cares if it is 12-shades darker than the lawn next door :-)
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