Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Very happy to have Snap-on with us here today at the event. Just to start us off, for those who might be a bit unfamiliar with Snap-on, and its company more broadly, could you give us an overview of the business and the very segments through which you operate?
Sure. You know, Snap-on is a business that's been around, now 140 years, and it was rooted in the auto, the vehicle repair industry, not the vehicle industry. So sometimes people think our cadence is associated much more closely with OEM and new car sales and so on. It doesn't have much to do with that. It has to do with the repair and the supply to people in repair of the tools and the implements they need to accomplish what we call critical tasks. And the fundamental unifying principle about our whole business has to do with being in workplaces, observing work, and seeing what particular tasks are sticky to the repairers, and then translating that observation into a new product that would make their work easier and allow them to make more money, in effect, be more effective. And that is principally the primary activity.
If you go back, that's how we founded the business, the original guy in 1920 who did just that with auto repairs in those times. So now we have a business that we have three operating segments that are focused on distinct customer bases. One is what we call the Snap-on Tools Group. This is what everybody thinks about when they think about Snap-on. It is a group that sells through, in the United States, 3,500 franchised vans who have routes that are based on list of calls. And they sell directly to auto technicians, the people who twirl the wrenches, in vehicle repair garages principally. They call on them once a week. This is about 40% of our business.
But it is kind of for a business like us, it's kind of an interesting phenomenon, is when people close their eyes and think about Snap-on, they think about the trucks, pretty much. And what it is, is the technicians are employing a job which we would call critical. That is, the penalty for repair is for failure is high. You know, if you don't get the car done, somebody doesn't pick up their children the next day, things like that. So it's a critical repair, and therefore they're willing to pay a premium for a product that's repeatable and reliable that is a Snap-on level product. Then, if you use the idea of criticality, there's a group of customers that's different than the technicians that stands right next to them. That's 40% of our business.
But there's a group of customers that stands right next to them, contiguous, which we started in later. That's the repair shop owners and managers. They buy a different set of products. They're not really working on the cars. They're aiding the work. So software that might run the garage or provide tips on repair information, or lifts that lift them up so they can do it overhead, or tire balancers, tire changers, or collision equipment, those kinds of things, semi-capital equipment, we have a different set of sales with different sales force that calls on those people through direct salesmen or through distributors. And not weekly, because they buy at a different cadence. They're much more sort of like a capital or semi-capital project. That's about 28% of our business.
Then the other 28% or 27% of our business is operating business is what we call C&I, commercial and industrial, which is, in effect, taking that idea of criticality and solving it and having the Snap-on brand out of the garage and in other industries like aviation, keeping planes flying, oil and gas, keeping the hydrocarbons flowing, the idea of windmills, the idea of the mining or military. If the .50 caliber bullets are going overhead, that's critical. You want to have things repaired. And that business is a big piece of our business. Then we have a credit company which underwrites borrowing by individual primarily by individual technicians who want to buy bigger ticket items through the van business.
Those are our three businesses: 40% selling to the technicians, 28% selling directly to the guys who stand next to them but are a different customer base, the repair shop owners and managers, and then the other 28 or 27% that sell to other industries. Then the rest is made up by the credit company.
Thank you. Looking at the long term, Snap-on has consistently grown earnings double-digit on mid-single-digit to high-single-digit revenue growth. Looking at consensus or investor expectations going forward, they're somewhat below that range. So my question's sort of twofold. First, do you see a pathway to continuing that cadence of growth? And secondly, where do you see the most opportunity going forward among your products or verticals?
Yeah. Well, I think, look, we do see opportunity to go forward. There are two reasons for that. Is that what drives our business actually is different things in different places. But one thing that drives our business in vehicle repair is the changing of the vehicles. A lot of people, I don't know if everyone appreciates that. So you can look at vehicle repair, or you can look at a Snap-on and say, boy, this is like a titan that is holding a huge market share. How are you going to expand on this? And the answer is, people just need new tools to make the repair. And what happens in vehicles is, as the technology has rolled through, you have a couple of things driving this. Several things driving this. One is the natural tendency for the vehicles to change.
I do think the broad public doesn't really understand this in terms of the repair challenges. You can look back a few dimensions. In the 1990s, the cars sort of had electronic trouble codes, and those trouble codes were measured in dozens. Now they're measured in tens of thousands. So that says the tool is the vehicles have become more fly-by-wire. This is apparently the drive-by-wire vehicle. And the interesting point is, over that time, the demand for hand tools has only gone up. And the reason is, every new car has a different configuration. They're all different configurations. And on top of that, because you go fly-by-wire, you need a greater and broader number of electronic aids to help you address that fly-by-wire.
Part of the underlying reason for this is, you know, when you design a car, you design it. I used to be an engineer myself, and you design it first for style. Nobody buys ugly cars. You design it for performance. People want a certain amount of oomph. You design it for cost. You design it for emissions. You design it for reliability. You design it for safety. You design it for accommodating electronics. And by the time you finish designing for that, you have no degrees of freedom left over in the design for repairability. So almost every new car has new challenges, and that's what drives our business. That's one. That's sort of the natural flow of the business, and it's done for years.
But what's happening now is I like to think we're getting into the golden age of auto repair because things are changing much more rapidly. Different types of propulsion. Electric cars. Everybody said electric cars are not going to have any problems. Well, check the results of Hertz. Or check Norway, where 80% of the cars are electric, and their shops are humming. And so there's not going to be any diminishment. You're going to need different tools. Well, by the way, now it's pretty apparent that electric cars aren't going to take over that quickly. So there's going to be a car park, which is 285 million vehicles in the United States. And there's going to be internal combustion engines for the foreseeable future all over that car park, even as electric cars start out. So you're going to need both sets of tools to deal with that.
This is music to our ears. Secondly, you do not only have electric cars but fully electric but plug-in hybrids, which are going to have both power plants: one, batteries; two, internal combustion engine. And by the way, you don't need to worry about charging. There's no range anxiety. And to me, they seem a much more popular alternative for people to invest in. For example, last year, 2023, the number of plug-in hybrids in China grew at an absolute number by more than the electric vehicles grew. So China is the primary market for electric vehicles. Well, last year, the big grower was plug-in hybrids, and I think it has to do with the efficacy of such a design. So you're going to see those come. And then people are talking about superhybrids without plug-in. They're going to make a difference.
And that all drives that different variance in propulsion together with the existing internal combustion engines are going to be great business for us. We see that driving. And then on top of it, people start talking about autonomous vehicles. Well, if you're going to have autonomous vehicles, you're going to have to have a lot more precision in how you repair cars and make sure things are precise. You're not going to want to press the auto park button if the car is out of alignment. Believe me. Bad things are going to happen. But you see that happening. I don't really know if you're going to be able to take your hands off the wheel and not worry about the car ever. I think that's a very, very difficult problem. And you're seeing those problems emerge in the marketplace today.
But you're going to need people have a preference for more automated driver assist systems. And one of the things that's going to drive that is electric cars. I don't know if you've driven an electric car, but if you get in an electric car and you look at the pillars, the pillar up here is a lot thicker, and the pillar here is monstrous, occluding your vision, actually. And the reason you need those pillars is the battery's too heavy. If you're going to survive the rollover test, you better have a lot of structure in those pillars, or you're going to be flattened like a pancake. And that's going to require more autonomy, if not just taking your hands off the wheel, just to be able to avoid those problems. And so that adds a lot of opportunities for us.
So that pretty much is driving the vehicle repair business, new products that have to deal with those things, in general, more fly-by-wire, the changing in propulsion, and therefore having more alternatives in garages, and then the autonomy. Then if you look at other industries, we're just not as penetrated. Those are also changing, but we're just not as penetrated. In vehicle repair, we're a big player. We have more than 50% share in the garages with the technicians and a nice share with the repair shop owners and managers. But in terms of aviation, oil and gas, and those kinds of things, we're still new in that situation. That business, by the way, in the last quarter grew. In fact, the last four quarters have grown double digits. And the margins are better than the vehicle repair business.
Thank you. Looking to the near term, growth in the tools business in the fourth quarter had declined for the first time since the pandemic. You attributed much of that to customer sentiment and the shift in that. So my question is, have you seen any change in that customer sentiment dynamic and then the related change in buying patterns? Based on previous periods where you've seen a shift in customer sentiment, how long does that buying behavior tend to shift for?
Yeah. I think the thing about this is sentiment is a little. I would have a more specific view of it. It's like this, is that sometimes I've said this a couple of times in the last few days, but I think it's true, is that it's certainly clear. From a financial perspective, there are two different. I'm finding two different economies in the world. There is the financial economy, where for a number of months, people were talking about the recessions coming because interest rates are going up, and the Fed is raising interest rates, and this is going to dampen certainly dampen the stock market because the value of future earnings in terms of narrative-based stocks are going to go down. So you have that kind of thing if you believe in the capital asset pricing model.
But that was dominating, I think, a lot of the economic and financial news and maybe the public news. But underneath it, in the garages, in the factories, people were very confident and positive by two things. One, they could see that they were in business. The garages kept humming. It didn't matter what the interest rates were doing. The garages kept humming. Secondly, they had survived the pandemic. And for what it's worth, these people kept working every day. They didn't shelter in place. They couldn't. They couldn't do their job. And so they were allowing us to have dinner, really. And so they were essential and necessary. And so they came out of the pandemic very positive because they had survived that and taken it on. And then they saw the actual business.
So if you step back and you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you see that technician wages were rising. The amount of spending was going up. The number of hours were going up. So in technicians and in factories, these things were seeing positives. Now, what happened is, ironically, as the world started almost not related, but as the world started to pivot and say, well, don't worry. We're going to have a soft landing, and the Fed's going to reduce earnings. They're going to lower rates 3, 4, 5, 6 times. If you listen to Motley Fool, you'd hear 6 times. But the next year or so I think from the macro point of view, on the Squawk Box point of view in the morning, things are positive. But if you started to go into the operations, the cars just kept humming.
The shops just kept humming. The factories were good. People were positive in terms of their cash flow. But they started to be affected by the macros. And by macros, I mean not necessarily economic macros. Things like it started in October, I think, early October, when the Middle East second war, the people in the garages are not dumb. They see the second war. What's going to happen here? They talk about increasing tensions with China. They hear more about the border. They've been hearing about the border all along. But I think the border went to another level. I often tell the story of Democratic senators in Washington saying, "the president's got to close the border. The city of Pittsburgh is presenting itself every month at the border. We got to do something about this." And they hear all this. They hear about the Red Sea.
They worry about the return in inflation. And then they do see inflation in their grocery bills, not in their garages, not in their fuel costs. So that's sort of a way out of it. And then finally, the increasing proximity of the election giving them a worry about, gee, I don't know what's going to happen during this election. Who knows what's going to happen? Not only who's going to be elected, but what is the guy who's elected going to do? Even if it's the current president, if he gets more of a mandate, he's allowed to do other things. If President Trump gets elected, he's going to do other things. And so that gets people nervous. And so what you have is people in the garages starting in the beginning in the October area starting to build up.
You heard them get they were cash-rich, a lot of money in their pocket, confidence poor. I don't know where the next year is going to go. So they tend to pivot towards shorter payback items, like wrenches in our parlance, wrenches and power tools and smaller boxes and so on, and so they don't get themselves tied to a longer-term payment. They're not. Like, it's fascinating. I hear people talk about people of work, when things go bad, they're going to stretch out. Well, first of all, things aren't going bad for those people right now. They're not borrowing. They're actually pulling in a little bit, at least the people I deal with. That tends to recreate, one, an attenuation on the overall volume.
But it mitigates a shift towards shorter payback items for us in terms of shift to what products you're going to design, which product, which task you're going to solve, where your production capacity is going to go because we're already fairly stretched in production capacity, and how you're going to sell, which products you're going to emphasize. So we're making that shift. Now, if you ask how long it's going to take, we've seen it twice before. We saw it in the Great Financial Recession, and we saw it in the pandemic, coming out of the pandemic. When people started to come out of the pandemic and they realized our business went in a V, we were recovered in a V very quickly. In fact, Tools Group was positive. The van business was positive in 2020 after hemorrhaging in the first and second quarter.
They actually overcame it in the third, fourth quarter. But the customers were more confidence poor. They didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't know if the pandemic was going to come back. They didn't know what action to go. So they tended to gravitate towards shorter payback items. We saw the same thing in the Great Financial Recession when everything melted down, and people were thinking about putting money in the mattresses. And so what eased that? I don't think any particular singularity change. Somebody flipped the switch. I think it had more to do with people getting used to dealing with the current conditions and saying, I've been living with this. I've been living with the two wars. The two wars have been going on for 12 months or 11 months or three quarters of a year, and nothing happened.
I don't think anything else is going to happen. I think, generally, things are going to continue OK as they are now. That's what needs to happen.
Looking at your balance sheet, you have a very strong balance sheet, supportive free cash flow that gives you quite a bit of optionality. Aside from the dividend, which you've been paying consistently and growing, how do you view capital allocation priorities? And has that changed at all in the last few years when there's been a lot more cash on the balance sheet?
Not really. I think this. Our capital allocation has generally been the same. Our business is a working capital hog. We eat a lot of working capital. You look at our inventory turns, you would believe it. They're not that I wouldn't call them world-class. Let's put it that way. But we don't care because we're getting a pretty good return. Last year, I think our return on our RONA was 37.6%, up 210 basis points. So I don't think whatever it is, we're using the inventory pretty well. But if you want to grow your business and Snap-on, you got to have working capital because we're low-volume products. We tend to go out, observe the work, come up with a product that fixes it. And many times, that's a low-volume product, therefore inventory-rich. Secondly, we worry about the dividend, as you say.
We've paid a dividend every quarter since 1939, and we have never reduced it. So we have one of the longest, if not the longest, record of uninterrupted, unreduced dividends on the New York Stock Exchange. So I think you can figure out what our dividend policy is. First and foremost, it's perpetuity. But we keep moving it up as we have more cash because we feel we have more. And then we look at acquisitions. We always maintain a list of acquisitions, a landscape of acquisitions, which we review monthly, really, and certainly quarterly with the board. And we've made acquisitions over the years. Some of them have been small. Some of them have been mid-range. But we're not afraid to acquire something big. Our team comes a lot of us come from United Technologies, where they made big acquisitions. We're not afraid of those.
But we're not looking to transform the business. We look to acquire businesses that are coherent with us, that are in the critical. This is what we know. So we know we know how to manage them. We like businesses that customize because we know how to do that. We know how to manage the complexity associated with that. So we keep doing that. And I wouldn't rule out a huge acquisition. I have no compunction because I know we have the management team to manage it. But we know who we are, and we know we don't want to say, sell to big boxes. We don't want to because that's not our thing. We're not a company that makes the money by the penny. And then after that, you talk about buying back stock on an opportunistic basis. That's what we do.
But I come back to we're not a company that makes our money by the penny. But one of the cool things about this you asked about continuing improvement. I remember when the operating margin was 5%. Last year was 22%, up 110 basis points. And the average margin growth over a period of time has been 85 basis points a year, not up 110 basis points. Not up 110%. And it's been 85 points a year. That's been average. That's table stakes for Snap-on. Our companies are tasked to do several things: work on the critical, maintain the brand, grow sales, grow profits, grow return on assets. And I don't care how they do it, really. But they do it pretty well. And one of the reasons why we can keep growing, I believe, is because by a lot of standards, Snap-on is an inefficient operation.
We have low scales. We're very vertically integrated. If you look at the hand tools business, raw steel comes in the back of a factory. And we operate on that. We forge it through cold pressure and heat to near net shape. We anneal that metal to take out the stresses. We grind it to sometimes 1/30th tight tolerance, is 1/30th of a human hair in certain cases. Then we heat treat it. It's black art to make it both flexible and stiff and strong, durable. And then we plate it to make it look like a jewel. And we ship it all the way through the franchisees to put in the hands of the end user.
So from the actual person who twirls the wrenches or punches the keys on the diagnostic units all the way to the raw steel, we're tremendously vertically integrated with all complex processes along the way. And we have 85,000 SKUs. So there's a verticality and a horizontal nature of our landscape that creates opportunities for improvement. And in a lot of ways, we're the low-scale headquarters. Some of our competitors have 100 times the scale that we have because they sell to DIY markets. Yet we've been able to do this. But inherent in that means that there's a lot of inefficiencies in that landscape. We haven't squeezed them all out by a long shot yet. So that's why we think we can keep getting profitable or more profitable.
Looking at the fourth quarter, you also mentioned expanding capacity to meet customer preferences. What has capacity been running at in the last few quarters? And historically, where has that run? And how should we think about it longer term?
Well, I would say in the last at least, let's say, from the end of the first quarter last year, we've been up to here in capacity. We're like a guy drowning trying to put your nose above the water. I mean, the thing is, we had a lot of trouble delivering. There was a lot of big backlogs in a lot of different places. And that's because there was this continual expansion coming at you. You sort of went into the COVID, so there was a little bit of fuzziness. And then out of the COVID, there was a lot of expansion in a lot of areas. And that put a lot of drain on our business. And so we were already expanding factories. Every major factory in the United States had an expansion program last year. Some of that isn't finished.
But what that meant, though, is in the fourth quarter, when you had the pivot to go to other products, this puts an even greater strain on your different product mix. It puts an even greater strain on your capacity utilization because you're not looking to build as many big boxes. And therefore, you have to create a mix change to be smaller carts, let's say, in a tool storage plant. Well, that means that if you were using 98% of your capacity before, now you're bumping up against 100% because you can't use as much of one portion of it. That's basically where we are. So we keep expanding. And some of those expansions are done, but most of them are in process. So what we're doing going forward is adjusting that capacity, that floor space, that extra machinery to more address the shorter payback items.
That will play out over the next several quarters.
Thank you. Looking at your customers, you talked about the wide number of SKUs and developing new ones as new vehicle models come out. Looking at your existing customers, are they looking to add to their portfolio of tools? Are they also upgrading their existing tools based on changes you've made or product developments?
Both. Both. Certainly, when a new model comes out, just something as simple as a hand tool, you may need a ratchet with a smaller head so that you can get it in a space that has all of a sudden become more compact. So they need to buy and expand their tools to adjust some of the idiosyncrasies of new vehicles. On the other hand, you might want to look at one of our new power tools. So for example, we just brought out what we call CT9038. It's an 18-volt power tool, 525 foot-pounds, which is a big number for a cordless tool. But it's packaged in a 5-inch. So it's doing the same thing as the former ones, about as much power but smaller, so much more maneuverable.
So you could do the job with the other ones, but you had to spend a lot more time moving around. And so this makes it better. So there's an example of just by virtue of taking a couple of three inches out of the length of the power tool, we made it much more desirable. And so that will replace some of the other tools. Then you think about diagnostics. For example, we brought out the SOLUS+. That's our low-end diagnostic laptop-for-car type thing. Well, the boot-up went from 15 seconds to 2 seconds. The screen got bigger. The resolution got bigger, 60% more resolution. Now, you might not think that's important. But our 60% brightness and visibility. Well, you're in a garage. You could be in a place where the sun is shining in, and maybe it isn't so easy to see.
So you have to maneuver around. The brighter the screen is, the better it is. And on top of it, it had access, more seamless access to more data. We have some great databases that are important in these businesses. Repairing a car is kind of a lot more complex than people think. It's got several phases. One is you bring the car in, and it's got a check engine light on. I just had one, actually. Not bad. It's a transmission fault. This didn't sound good. So you bring it into the garage. And so there's a process where you use these diagnostic units, either wirelessly or connected, to scan the car. And the car's got these tens of thousands of trouble codes. And you scan the array of trouble codes.
And by virtue of the array of particular codes that are tripped, you understand a fingerprint of what's wrong. But the codes, no matter how many trouble codes they have, those trouble codes are not definitive. They don't tell you exactly what to do. The next step, you say, OK, the car's telling me this. Now I go to another database. And the traditional way to do this was to take a database and go through a set of physical tests we would call decision trees. You would call it easy. And you go, here. Yes. OK, you go to here. No. Go here. Yes. And you go down. And physically, you have to operate on the car with tools to do this, and measuring and so on, scopes and other devices. And you determine at the end that it's a mass airflow sensor, about $600 device.
You can check it out. If it's bad, you replace it. That took some time. Technicians get paid not on time but on the accomplishment of jobs. All right. You can do that. Or we have an exclusive proprietary database that has 2.7 billion instances of repairs in cars. So this SOLUS+ will give you access to, we call it SureTrack. And what it does do is it'll say you'll type in this particulars. Here's the model, the make, the miles. And then you communicate the signature, the fingerprint that the car has told you. And then it'll give you a Pareto diagram. It'll say, wow, 62% of the time it was a mass airflow sensor. 15% of the time, it was the wiring harness in that area. 12% of the time, it's something else, and so on. And so you'll go and test.
You won't do this decision tree. You'll save a lot of time. Test the mass airflow sensor. If that doesn't work, you go to the next one. You go to the next one. If none of those are wrong, if they're all OK, then you go if you pay us more money, if you get a more sophisticated product, you'll get our 355 billion data point database that allows you to hone in, allow you to solve those unusual items that aren't in the Pareto diagram because they occur too infrequently, and allow you to do the in effect, do the diagnosis that we did before in the database we're providing that are 2.7 billion to create the understanding. And so therefore, it'll allow you to solve those things that come up very rarely. This is important for an independent shop, and it will save a lot of time.
Then you've done that. So you've scanned the car to determine the fingerprint. You've diagnosed it to say, this is what's wrong. Now you've got to repair the car. And so then you need a whole set of tools to go out there and physically repair it, either on a physical basis, like the hand tools or power tools or so on, or on an electronic basis with scopes and other things and meters that allow you to repair it or rewiring diagrams and things like that that you have to address in repairing the car. So there are really three phases in which we operate in both. But in two of them at least actually, in all three, we think we have a proprietary advantage.
And so all of this is really the value of Snap-on is driving that productivity in both hand tools and software. Looking at the diagnostics market, what's the competition like there? When a customer is looking at various offerings versus Snap-on's proprietary databases, what might drive them?
Price. Price. That's it. Yeah, everything. By the way, there are some prices. We often test the preferred form of hand tool or diagnostics or anything like that. But sometimes we'll see, oh, 70% of the people say Snap-on is number one. The average we'll ask is it'll be 60 or 70, somewhere in between there. And number two will be 12 or 13%. Sometimes our price will be 10 times more than number two. So a lot of times, it's really just price. Now, the price translates into less productivity. So a lot of it will depend, I think. There are two things that depend on three, I suppose. One, obviously, it's the affordability. Does the guy think they have the money? But they do think they have the money, especially these aren't discretionary things. So one is the money.
Two, though, is how often do I think I'm going to use this tool, and how effective is it going to be? But maybe the trump card is this. It has to do with a non-quantitative reaction. And that is the people at work view Snap-on tools, the display of the Snap-on brand, the use of our devices and tools as the outward sign of the pride and dignity and the special nature of what they do. So if they buy a cheaper tool, they might be able to do it slower, actually accomplish the task with less productivity. But they might say, OK, I only do it a little, not that often. Therefore, I'll do that. But they communicate to the world maybe they're not so special. So you have those balances. That's why people buy us, actually. Now, it doesn't win all the time.
But I like our chances to win with any technician.
With that balance, is there a significant deviation between independent shops and dealerships?
No, actually. We sell about the same amount to dealerships as is their proportion of the repair that they do. So actually, there doesn't seem to be any. The only difference is in diagnostics, where diagnostics, a lot of the software and the analysis is provided by the OEM themselves. Now, sometimes they'll ask us through one of our businesses to package it in a delivery model. But they are the ones that provide the software. So for the scanning and the diagnosis, that would be OEM supplied in a dealership. So that's less so. The repair isn't that way. So we would be selling a repair. But often, OEM technicians have more money to pay for the stuff. So therefore, it balances out. The difference, though, another difference, though, is that independent repair shops, their task is so much more daunting. You might not think so.
But over 70% of past post-warranty repairs are done in independent shops. And compare these two things. If you're in a dealership, you're pretty much working on the cars that are on the sign out in the front. If you're in a Chevy dealership, they're working on Chevys. And they're only working on the new ones because it gets too expensive to pay for the repair after warranty. So their repair task is much more narrow, actually. They get paid more for it, but it's much more narrow. And part of it is because of warranty. And because of their position, they sometimes get the more difficult repairs. But if you go into an independent shop, they could be working on anything: Chevys and BMWs and Saabs and Mini Coopers and Porsches and anything. It could be anything in that shop. And it isn't just the new ones.
In fact, it's probably a lot of the old ones. The average car in the United States has been on the road 12.5 years. That means there's cars over 20 years. And those are being repaired in the independent shops. And they need this huge array of both electronic and physical tools to take advantage of those things. And so our business is very robust. People always ask, are the technicians going to be able to keep up with the changing of the cars, the more electronics, all these things? They can because they can buy Snap-on products who will allow them to keep up. Those things work pretty well. And I think in terms of the brand, though, the brand is pretty broad.
So as I've said many places, we have people who wear our jackets and put their wrenches in the hands of their newborns and actually bury their ashes in our small toolboxes. And that is without regard to industry. So I don't know how many times I've been on a plane where the pilot has come back and said, are you the Snap-on guys? Boy, I love your tools. So you hear it in planes. You see it in county fairs. I go to a county fair every summer, Schaghticoke, New York, Rensselaer County. I've been there every year since I was five. And since I've been at Snap-on, I walk around. I'm attuned to this. You see people wearing Snap-on hats and Snap-on t-shirts. And they're dairy farmers. They aren't mechanics. Now, maybe some of them are repairing stuff.
But they actually truly are devoted and want to align with our brand. One of the things about the brand that's kind of interesting, I think, is that when you talk to analysts, it's hard for us all, people of white collar, to appreciate it because it is basically a blue-collar brand. The power of Snap-on is extraordinary in garages and with the people who work. But it decays exponentially as you go up the first floor of any building. And so therefore, you have to actually explore it all to really understand how powerful it is. We're not going to let that go away.
Well, thank you very much with that. I think we're just about out of time.
OK.
Thank you for joining us for today.
All right. Thank you.