I have been analyzing Black Friday and holiday season tool deal trends for 17 years. For the first time, Dewalt has broken their long-established strategy of offering a cordless drill kit to the masses for just $99.
This has not happened once since I started analyzing tool deals, and it has never happened before for Dewalt’s modern 20V Max cordless power tool system. Since at least 2009, Dewalt has always had $99 cordless drill kit deals in November.
You cannot buy any Dewalt cordless drill kit for $99 this year. Following are all of the advertised and promotional offers I have found so far.
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Home Depot Dewalt Cordless Drill Deals
Dewalt Atomic Cordless Drill Kit – $119 – they raised the price by $20, and it looks like they removed the tool bag that used to be included
Dewalt 20V Max Cordless Drill Kit – $129
Lowe’s Dewalt Cordless Drill Deals
Dewalt 20V Max Brushless Drill Kit – $119 – they raised the price, and from the images it also looks like they removed the tool bag here too
Dewalt 20V Max Cordless Drill Kit – $129
Amazon Dewalt Cordless Drill Deals
Dewalt 20V Max Cordless Drill Kit – $116.75
Dewalt 20V Max Brushless Drill Kit – $119 – the tool bag seems to be missing here too
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Competitive Contexts
Retailers still ordered huge quantities from Dewalt. My local Home Depot store reports 46 in stock of the Dewalt cordless drill kit that was both cheapened and made more expensive compared to last year. Consumers looking to buy a Dewalt drill will be spending more and getting a less for it.
Somehow, Milwaukee is still offering an M18 compact brushless drill kit at Home Depot and elsewhere for $99.
Home Depot also also have a Milwaukee M12 Fuel brushless hammer drill kit for $99.
Bosch, another pro-grade cordless power tool brand, has a $79 deal at Amazon right now, with brushless tool, charger, 2 batteries, and a charger.
Metabo HPT has a $99 brushless drill kit deal at Amazon.
Flex has a 24V Max brushless drill kit for $99 at Lowe’s.
The very best that Dewalt can do this year is an old brushed motor kit with their cheapest batteries for $129, or their newer entry-priced brushless drills with a charger, battery, and no tool bag for $119.
Competitors in the professional cordless power tool space have so far maintained their promotional pricing strategies.
The peculiar part is that the initial display of Dewalt boxes at my local Home Depot store show that a tool bag is included with the kit. Online, all of the product images have been changed, and their inclusions now only list a battery and charger.
This leads me to conclude that Dewalt raised the price and are giving you less. Perhaps my local store had remnant inventory and put those out first.
It’s not just Dewalt’s myriad of different $99 cordless drill kit deals that have been affected this year – they’ve done the same to their different promotionally impact driver and oscillating multi-tool kits as well.
Nearby at the same stores, customers are going to find competitive options that cost less and deliver more.
Magazines and newspapers are still hyping up the brushed motor drill kit deal, saying things like “might I suggest [the magazine’s] absolute favorite drill and driver kit, on sale now for $50 off?”
Well, it’s not $50 off, despite what Dewalt, retailers, and magazines are suggesting.
This particular deal, Dewalt’s DCD771C2 cordless drill kit, has been a holiday season promotion at $99 since 2013.
Even Amazon can’t sell this outdated Dewalt cordless drill kit at $99 right now.
Dewalt has offered a $99 cordless drill kit since at least 2009, when I first started paying close attention to industry trends, and a $99 20V Max cordless drill kit since 2013. Not even the global pandemic swayed them from offering $99 promotionally-priced drill kits in 2020.
Will this be the new norm for Dewalt, with $119 the new promotional price target?
Does Stanley Black & Decker have steel confidence in their market position, allowing them to break from long-established promotional strategy?
Or are they bleeding and did this to avoid upsetting investors?
What are the implications?
Will what seems like a move by Dewalt to protect their profits in the face of tariffs lead to a shift where competitors match their $119 price point, creating a new norm?
Or will they go back to a $99 mass market price target next year?
Not to mince words, I think the Dewalt tool kits will likely continue to sell well, even at inflated pricing, because too many consumers will be successfully convinced that they’re actually good bargains.
What remains to be seen is whether this price increase, which is unprecedented for Dewalt in modern times, will have short or long term significance, or maybe both.
Al-another-Al
“might I suggest” sounds like “they wanted to buy a recommendation, but as an individual…I will repeat the company line that generates revenue”
Stuart
Their entire article had red flags, such as saying HD’s Black Friday deals “skipped all customary bounds of the calendar.”
A decade ago I had already learned to scout out the majority of Home Depot’s Black Friday deals starting on the first Monday following Halloween.
It has been “Black Friday all November” for years, and this has been the 6th year HD and other retailers have embraced this in their public marketing efforts.
Magazines and publications are supposed to be on the same side as the readers. Instead, I feel they’re gaslighting their audiences to squeeze out more money. All that misinformation is now “training” AI answer engines, but I digress.
Dewalt drill deals in November are like the price of Arizona iced tea. It’s not like gold, gasoline, or the price of eggs. $99 was the hard-set standard, and I’m sure it influenced the cordless power tool industry as Li-ion tech progressed.
That’s why this development is significant, especially if it turns out to be anything more than a one-year blip in an otherwise long-unchanging pricing strategy.
Bonnie
“Magazines and publications are supposed to be on the same side as the readers. ”
I can’t think of a time that was ever true, at least for ad-supported magazines. Even the old copies of Wood and Popular Woodworking I have from decades ago would run power tool company ads opposite their “shootout” comparisons and always felt like you had to take anything they said about a sponsor with a pinch of salt.
TomD
I’m really surprised they felt they couldn’t hit that 99$ by hook or crook, especially considering how many others did.
I wonder what’s going on there; they seem surprisingly unprepared.
Stuart
To my understanding, brands put out loss leaders or slim-margin promotions for the sake of tangible and intangible benefits, such as sales. brand familiarity, and user growth within a cordless battery ecosystem.
You might have noticed that Makita exited the $99 cordless drill kit scene a few years ago. These types of deals and promotions can have heavy costs.
Dewalt cordless drill kit deals were absent from Home Depot during the Father’s Day shopping season.
Home Depot doesn’t have a replacement for Dewalt, and Dewalt doesn’t have a replacement for Home Depot.
Don’t think that Milwaukee and others are less impacted by increasing costs and tariffs. Maybe they have a higher tolerance for this, greater hunger for market and user growth, or their investors are less likely to panic once sales and revenue figures for the quarter and year are released.
There’s a lot that we don’t know.
All we know for certain is that this is the first break in a very long trend where Dewalt is unable or unwilling to sell promotional cordless drill kits at $99 for Black Friday.
Learning anything beyond that would require having VP and C-suite level conversations.
MM
That Flex compact drill is actually quite impressive. It’s smaller than it looks in the photos, it is actually shorter than the M12 Fuel. It’s remarkably powerful, grip is excellent, and the chuck is nice. The only potential downside to it is that the 24V batteries are bigger than the various alternatives.
Robert
MM, that was pretty much my thoughts too. A 24V class brushless drill with a good charger for $99. Granted, Kobolt is 24V also. But they don’t seem as robust as Flex tools.
EG
I grabbed a Flex drill, impact driver, and impact wrench from the recent Lowe’s deals a short while back and it’s a great bit of kit, all three pieces are dumb small in size and I’m more than happy with them
MM
I bought several things from that sale too. In my case: the Quick-eject impact driver, inline circular saw, D-handle jigsaw, and trim router. I had been waiting for a couple years for a good opportunity to buy into Flex and that was a great one. I have a slight preference for the ergonomics of my old Dewalt DCF895 impact driver over the Flex Quick Eject but the Flex kicks the snot out of the 895 power-wise, and I really like its control modes as well, that is something I am normally critical of.
I might buy this drill too as I have been looking for a compact drill the last few months and this is on my short list. The deal looks great. That said, another drill is a want more than a need, and I’m in the middle of upgrading to a proper HVLP painting setup so I may need to cool it with the unnecessary purchases for a bit.
JMJR
Why didn’t they bundle it with a 1.3Ah battery and the DCB1102 2Amp charger to get it down to $99?
Stuart
They already shifted all of the brushless drill and impact driver kits from 2x 1.3Ah or 1.5Ah battery packs to 1x 2Ah in recent years. Switching to 1x 1.5Ah would not have been a good move, even if the Li-ion battery cells were available in necessary quantities.
Nathan
With inflammation like it is I’m surprised they went 17 years