Snapper makes a decent mower, but similar quality mowers can be found at far cheaper prices.

Bah! Bah, I say!

I've mowed yards professionally for years. Even thought about going back to it lately, as the exercise and pay is actually better...

But anyway, we used Snapper mowers. Tried a few others, but always went back to the Snappers. They ran. And ran and ran. And then kept running. When they did break, it was easy to fix ourselves. Once per mowing season each one would break the damn spring that controlled the self-propel, but it was a 5 minute fix if we had a replacement ($5) in the truck, or a 10 minute fix (at most) if we had to break out the needlenose pliers and expanded the broken spring and use some bailing wire to rig it all up. Aside from that, it was just usual maintenence, sharpen the blades every month, watch the self-propel belt, keep the filter clean, keep crap out of the gas and oil.

We liked that the body was kept the same for years and years. Made it real easy to mow at the proper height for each yard, didn't have to fiddle around with different heights on different mower brands, or even different models of the same brand, which was a problem with some of the other mowers we'd tried.

We also liked that it was easy to bypass the stupid kill switch crap. It's a pain to have the engine die if you let go of the handle, so we'd rewire that crap. Well, the pain is that you then, usually, have to push the mower onto the sidewalk or driveway to re-start it, which costs time. Not a big deal for home users, but a big deal for us.

I still use one of our old Snappers for my personal lawn mower. In fact, damnit, now y'all have reminded me that I need to use it tonight :)