Having completed a five year tour of duty in the Tools section of the local Sears store, I was one of those that assembled the floor demonstrators.
The prudent thing to do is to install the sharp blades in upside down or backwards so that curious fingers don't get cut. But the blades remained with the machine when it came time to sell the floor model.
As an aside, I was cleaning the table of a jointer demo where the blades were put in the correct way and sliced the living heck out of two of my finger tips. Required four stiches. One was the middle finger so with the bandage I was continuiously giving some one "the bird".
Anyway, I always tried to install all the accessories, blades, etc. on to the demo because if they were left lying beside the demo, the parts would disappear within the week. There are several reasons this happens which I won't go into now. Also there was no place to store the extra pieces so that they would be available when it came time to sell the demo.
I always installed the blades backwards on the scroll saws, band saws, circular saws etc. on the advice of our store Loss Control Nazi.
Quite often when it came time to sell the floor model, it was missing parts so we had to sell it at a deep discount and "as is" which was OK since the model was discontinued.
Since it was a recent model the parts were always available from Sears Parts. The customer could buy the parts that were missing since the got the machine at a steep discount.
Actually the whole scene was a PITA.
