At one time, Sears was the best place to get many things; but competition with discount marketers (in part) resulted in their hiring lots of "managers" and "marketers" and their value as a place to go has declined draastically.
Craftsman hand tools still, in most cases, have the lifetime guarantee; but they now use the Craftsman name on tools that are considered "consumable" and the lifetime is "the useful lifetime of the tool" rather than your lifetime. For those things, Sears considers it "no longer useful if it breaks." and it's lifetime is expired.
Different warranties for different items are a practical necessity in today's markets, but Sears does an exceedingly poor job of indicating which tools have which conditions.
For tools that are covered by the traditional Craftsman guarantee, I've found that store employees generally are not aware that Sears has ever warranted anything, so it nearly always is neessary to "escalate" a claim to "higher management." Escalating loudly, and assembling a crowd has been an effective method for me, and in a couple of cases I've received applause from the crowd when the salesperson had completed the training that I provided.
That shouldn't be necessary.
If you want a lifetime warranty on tools that's stil a true "no-quibble" one, you can buy Snap-On tools - at about 3x the Craftsman price, if you can find an agent.
Many areas in the US do have a Sears parts outlet, although it can be hard to find one even when one is nearby. Repair parts can usually be found at one of these without paying the extra shipping costs, but they're still usually more costly than from other sources if you can make a "conversion."
In my area, among the 30 or 40 "hardware stores" within a half-hour, there are about three where I can buy a left-hand threaded nut in SAE, UNF, UNC, Whitworth, BAE, or a couple of "standard non-standard" threads; but it takes research to locate the few that have the less common ones.
My personal objection to regularly patoronizing Sears is that their advertising is false, misleading, and predatory. Their "sale" prices for tool sets are invariably the regular price for the set, but are compared to the cumulative price of buying each component of the set separately at the "single-piece" prices.
That's dishonest.
I've also had at least three friends who worked for Sears who had excellent sales performance, but were "attritioned" for not selling enough "extended warranties." You should not have to buy something twice to expect it to work, but Sears now makes a very large percentage of income from "it won't work unless you pay extra" - which, if true, renders their advertised prices false, misleading, and dishonest.