I haven't bought anything of Menards, but given what they are manufacturing at the price point it is at, it is designed to be kind of like what Marx was in the day, low cost postwar semi scale equipment, along with some pretty nice buildings and tinplate track. They aren't in the train business per se, this is a side business that someone there wanted to do, and expecting them to be like a hardware store that once carried Lionel trains is not really a fair assumption, from what i know (Menard's sadly doesn't have stores in my area) they only really carry stuff in their stores around the holiday season in any kind of quantity (could be wrong, just my impression). The trains are really more like a way to advertise Menards, to get people to buy things there, rather than a direct bottom line kind of thing. Given what floor space means in a store, they aren't going to dedicate floor space, which is expensive, to carry things outside their product line, floor space is expensive and I doubt carrying stuff a train store would carry would be economically viable for them, the cost of the floor space > revenue. Likewise, given the price points of their products, it is unlikely that quality control/assurance is a major focus, it is like buying a cheap Chinese set of headphones versus buying Senheiser or Bose or the like, you buy it knowing it likely is not going to have the quality of the more expensive ones (though price and quality are not always equated, either, cheap toyotas have often been of better quality then very expensive cars like Mercedes).
If you are expecting scale fidelity, top of the line wheel sets, etc you likely won't see it here, but if you like the whimsy of what they produce, something really more toy like, then it is quite a bargain IMO.
