I read a piece on a home repair blog about how steel prices went up and it trickled down to tool storage. The guy who wrote it said the same thing happened back in 2008 and then again in 2021. He said the boxes get hit harder than the tools because they use more raw metal. A lot of the big brands also run sales that are not real sales, they just mark it up first and then drop it back to where it was. Your garage sale guy was right, the sticker is just a starting point and you can almost always do better if you wait or haggle.

That "40 minutes on a 12x15 in Akron" number is what got me too, because that's a small room. I'm guessing the kicker shines when you're working tight against baseboards and dont want to drag the stretcher around the whole space. What I want to know is how much knee damage the guy is risking, because power stretching looked safer to me until I saw that time gap.