Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
The thing that scares me about this is that I have never been able to actually walk into a Home Depot and get "good advice" and the thing that I actually need on the first trip.
It's always four or five trips, and on each trip I end up talking to yet another store employee who spends five minutes (on average) telling me what an idiot the OTHER guy was for telling me to buy whatever it was I bought on that trip.
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I hear ya, Ricky, but for sheer aggravation and incompetence, I'd pit my local Home Depot against yours any day. First off, the Hyannis, MA Home Depot is about a third of the size of most of their stores and shares an inadequate parking lot with a large supermarket, an Old Navy store, an A.C. Moore crafts store, and several smaller independent merchants. The garden department is an afterthought. The store seldom has the specials advertised in the newspaper circulars. Good luck finding anyone to cut a piece of glass or lumber. When you find an employee wandering in an aisle, chances are that he or she works in another department and can't answer your questions about the products in that aisle.
Here's a true story: I needed to replace a stair tread on my deck. I needed a 2-by-10. In the bin marked "10x2" (about 6 feet off the ground), the lumber is obviously 4-by-4s. I ask the young man in the orange apron where the 2-by-10s are. He points to the bin. "It's mismarked," I say, "those are 4-by-4s." He looks perplexed, and starts to CLIMB UP TO THE BIN WITHOUT USING A LADDER. Like that was going to magically change its contents. Visions of a workman's comp claim zipped through my mind. Eventually another employee located the right board. Because a board that big is kind of unwieldy, I opted to wait in the single, long checkout line that is actually manned by a cashier. The self checkouts don't have handheld scanners. Everything has to be passed over the scanner set in the counter.
It's almost needless to say that I don't shop for lumber or hardware there anymore. The local True Value hardware store may resemble a rabbit warren and be as expensive as hell, but they have everything under the sun and the guys that work there can find it for you!