I was a Snap On dealer for 6 years.

Dealers are all franchises, not 'drivers'. The warranty is usually under 2% of sales. If it goes higher than that, the management start to whine. Mine was almost never higher; the most expensive thing I replaced under warranty was a $10,000 engine analyzer.

Getting a dealer to warranty tools should not be considered a hassle for him if you do it at one of his stops. I would generally not go chase warranty - but if someone jumps on the truck with a broken tool I would replace it without thinking. Snap-on compensates the dealers 100% of cost of the tool, so it is not the dealer paying for it. He also gets a chance to sell you something new.

Lucky to have customers? Snap-on has 4000+ dealers in the USA, and each one services about 300 customers. Average sales for a truck is around $500,000 per year now with 35% gross margins. Lots of customers, way more than you would ever think. Some of my biggest customers were in weird locations, like a lawnmower place that had all giant tool boxes in them. A KRL1033 is a big bench toolbox and costs $11,000 for the EMPTY toolbox https://store.snapon.com/KRL1033-Series-Roll-Cabs-Roll-Cab-T... . I wrote 120 extended payment contracts in 1991, most of them for big toolboxes. I was #2 that year at the branch.

$40,000 is a lot of tools, but that is cheaper than some college educations these days with much higher residual value. My biggest single sale was $92,000.00 for a 2 man shop's insurance claim. That was 2 large boxes with hand and airtools in them, no equipment. Granted, they were my best customers and had the receipts to prove it. Insurance company pressured me for 10% off, but that was ok with me.

Your Snap-on dealer may have been persistent just to collect money. Dealers run a no-interest account for most of their 300 customers. The lions share of the job is collecting money, selling tools is easy. Collecting money is hard, especially from students. I ran about $50,000 over 150 customers. I know other dealers that would float $300,000 on the street, guys in Alaska and the other oil spots.

It was a good training business. I don't regret it, I made a lot of money. In 1991 I made $85,000 with only a high school education. I was 21 years old. I call it a training business because it is hard to expand. There is no practical way to hire employees besides having a complete second truck. Also, the more accounts you get sooner or later they want to cut your area. The change to franchising actually gave dealers more rights at that point. My area was cut 3 times in 6 years.

At the end of the day it is a service job, and we are servicing the needs of professional tool users, people that make their living with those tools. It is very competitive and I don't see anyway the service level could be kept up without the high prices and the current margins. The professionals need the service to function, the Snap-on dealer was also the one guy that you knew would have the special tools you needed to get that one thing apart. There is 12,000 items in the catalog and the basic wrenches and screwdrivers make up a small part of it. Most of the tool count is in special wrenches and sockets.