I am done with Home Depot!

And can we all agree Lowe's and Home Depot generally suck in some way, shape, or form? 

They both have terrible lumber offerings, unless you like your wood pre-curved like a Tsunami wave. As others have said, patronize your local lumber yards. 

I've gotten total crap lumber from real lumberyards too.

I now pick the store based on which type of lumber I need.

Rooftop shingle delivery for free though, that's the reason to use a good roofing supply house.

DirtyBird222 said:

And can we all agree Lowe's and Home Depot generally suck in some way, shape, or form? 

They both have terrible lumber offerings, unless you like your wood pre-curved like a Tsunami wave. As others have said, patronize your local lumber yards.

Yeah, useable, well-finished lumber is hard to find at either one. For that stuff, a local supply house is the way to go, at least around here. My FIL is a contractor and does a lot of business with HD, but still goes to the local spots for lumber. 

I can't speak for Lowes, but as a 4-year former employee of HD, I can speak to the issue.

HD does a remarkable job of berkeleying stuff up.  They give employees a remakable level of responsibility and freedom to accomplish their jobs, but zero resources.  If I need to make a sign to showcase an event or a sale price, I get the sign stock, grab the spray paint and sharpies of the shelf and mark them down for store use, and go nuts.  The thing I loved about HD was the amount of creativity, logic, and inventiveness I had the freedom to use.

Once you get to a computer, that all stops.  The software that they provide us is so insanely stupid that it boggles the imagination.  When you're hired, there are two days of online training JUST FOR THE SOFTWARE.  The training is terrible, the software is worse, and it seriously ties our hands.

Example:  When I started with HD, I was hired to be part of a new pilot department in which HD was setting up warranty repair centers for everything we sell (except appliances... manufacturers kept that to themselves.)  They made it part of the rental department and our work space was a closet.  Not kidding.  In an effort to make sure we repaired things in the order they came in, the RO software prevented us from opening a new RO until the prior one was completed.  So here's how it went:  You open a repair order which takes it from "new" to "in diagnosis" status.  It's a Ridgid Drill.  You go back to the cage in receiving, find the drill among 600 others, take it up front and figure out that it has a bad trigger.  You order the trigger which puts you in "awaiting parts" status.  Parts take two weeks to arrive.  In that two weeks, I can't open the next RO, but the policy was that ROs were not allowed to stay "new" for more than 5 days.  So I kept getting calls from corporate that I have ROs in "new" status for more than 5 days.... but I can't open the RO until my parts come in two weeks from now and I repair the drill.  In a nutshell, for every 30 minute repair we had to do, it took over 2 weeks to do it.  We basically worked toward our goal for 30 minutes every two weeks.

On top of that, they made it part of Rental, but didn't authorize the department any additional hours.  We just had to break the rules and add 80 hours a week to the department, but since we were still technically rental employees, we were listed as coverage for that department.  I can't repair a rotary hammer when I'm 3 deep at the rental desk and cleaning sewer snakes.

90% of what we had were lawnmowers/snowblowers (depending on the season), and we quickly went from 7 ROs to over 250 in a matter of weeks.  What should have happened is that they come in with a mower that won't start (because they left ethanol fuel in the carb all winter) and I say, "shop around and give me 20 minutes."  I pull the bowl, blast some carb cleaner up the jet, put in a $1 spark plug, and charge them $20... and in the meantime, maybe they bought a new doorknob, or a clearance showerhead.  But no. Sorry, Clyde, there are 250 repairs in front of yours. We had lawnmowers there for two years.  Stores ended up taking the biggest hit because it was a customer service nightmare.  I don't know how many brand new mowers, drills, and weed whackers got marked down to free to take care of customers who were ticked that they were without their tool for 9 months.

For the most part, HD and Lowes are pretty good.  I know more than most of the employees there, but usually each department has at least one pro.  Look for the old person in a smock.  Chances are he or she is a retired plumber who needed an income, or a general contractor picking up extra cash in the winter when building is slow.

To your specific problem, I know exactly what happened.  HD tries to consolidate all the information into the orders.  It's nice because every single thing pertaining to your order is listed under the order number.  The problem is, it doesn't generate any notifications.  They rely on you physically logging into the order to check the status.  In a sea of thousands of daily orders, no one has the time or patience to sift through every single order to check the status.  Imagine if you posted 1000 threads here on this forum and didn't set up any notifications.  Would you remember every single thread you posted?  In which sub forum did you post?  Are there any responses?  When would you even have time to check them?  After all, you have 65 other responsibilities to accomplish in your 8 hour shift.  Checking all of your orders for anomalies would be more than a full time job.

Blame corporate and their software, not the associate.  It's a quagmire to put it nicely

stroker said:

chandler said:

Reading these I’m glad I live in the land of Menards. Orange closed up here years ago so we have blue and green with little Reds sprinkled throughout. I always go green first, supposing they don’t have it I’ll go blue or skip right to Red and expect to pay more but talk to someone who knows what they are saying.

Green and Red?

 

Menards and Ace

chandler said:

stroker said:

chandler said:

Reading these I’m glad I live in the land of Menards. Orange closed up here years ago so we have blue and green with little Reds sprinkled throughout. I always go green first, supposing they don’t have it I’ll go blue or skip right to Red and expect to pay more but talk to someone who knows what they are saying.

Green and Red?

 

Menards and Ace

This .... except, generally speaking, the power tool quality at Menards pretty much sucks

einy said:

chandler said:

stroker said:

chandler said:

Reading these I’m glad I live in the land of Menards. Orange closed up here years ago so we have blue and green with little Reds sprinkled throughout. I always go green first, supposing they don’t have it I’ll go blue or skip right to Red and expect to pay more but talk to someone who knows what they are saying.

Green and Red?

 

Menards and Ace

This .... except, generally speaking, the power tool quality at Menards pretty much sucks

It's all stanley/black and decker there. Given that Stanley basically owns them all these days (stanley, black and decker, craftsman, porter cable, bostitch, and Dewalt- They've gotta have something. Come to think of it, my whole tool wall at Red- is Stanley group, with the exception of Milwaukee- which is quite easily the most expensive. 

dj06482 said:

Locally, the hardware selection at Lowes blows away the selection at Home Depot.

Agreed.

I'll occasionally buy oak, poplar or maple from either place, but I never buy important (straight) 2x lumber there.

In reply to Mndsm :

Milwaukee is owned by TTI (home depot) along with Ridgid and Ryobi.

Milwaukee is a shadow of it's former self.

I like Stihl's advertizing from a couple years ago "Stihl not available at Home Depot".

We need some sort of Poll Thread on power tools...

ShawnG said:

In reply to Mndsm :

Milwaukee is owned by TTI (home depot) along with Ridgid and Ryobi.

Milwaukee is a shadow of it's former self.

I like Stihl's advertizing from a couple years ago "Stihl not available at Home Depot".

Home Depot and TTI are very much separate companies. Home Depot happens to be TTI's main vendor in the US. Ridgid and Ryobi are more directly controlled by TTI even on the product development level. Milwaukee is much more autonomous, the product development and business advances/acquisitions are done by Milwaukee, for Milwaukee. TTI is more of the overlord that provides manufacturing and capital support while reaping the benefits of Milwaukee's growth, success and patent portfolio. It's not just another tool brand being hocked by TTI. 

Just wanted to clarify that a little bit. I get my jimmies rustled a little bit when people say it like that because it make Ryobi and Ridgid sound like equals to Milwaukee. I'm a little biased and quite passionate about the red tools, mostly because they pay my mortgage but I do love my red tools, especially the ones I've designed.

I stopped at the orange apron depot long ago. They suck, they don’t even know what straight lumber is, and they no longer have people working the floor. Well, one or two, but they don’t know jack. 

Support your local hardware store. Help keep a mom and pop shop open before the Lowes Depot *Marts of the world shut them down. 

RacetruckRon said:

ShawnG said:

In reply to Mndsm :

Milwaukee is owned by TTI (home depot) along with Ridgid and Ryobi.

Milwaukee is a shadow of it's former self.

I like Stihl's advertizing from a couple years ago "Stihl not available at Home Depot".

Home Depot and TTI are very much separate companies. Home Depot happens to be TTI's main vendor in the US. Ridgid and Ryobi are more directly controlled by TTI even on the product development level. Milwaukee is much more autonomous, the product development and business advances/acquisitions are done by Milwaukee, for Milwaukee. TTI is more of the overlord that provides manufacturing and capital support while reaping the benefits of Milwaukee's growth, success and patent portfolio. It's not just another tool brand being hocked by TTI. 

Just wanted to clarify that a little bit. I get my jimmies rustled a little bit when people say it like that because it make Ryobi and Ridgid sound like equals to Milwaukee. I'm a little biased and quite passionate about the red tools, mostly because they pay my mortgage but I do love my red tools, especially the ones I've designed.

I've got the Milwaukee HackZall. Love that thing. 

DrBoost said:

I stopped at the orange apron depot long ago. They suck, they don’t even know what straight lumber is, and they no longer have people working the floor. Well, one or two, but they don’t know jack. 

Support your local hardware store. Help keep a mom and pop shop open before the Lowes Depot *Marts of the world shut them down. 

Mom and Pop hardware will survive or lose depending more on how well they are run and managed  plus population numbers than anything. 

In reply to RacetruckRon :

A little story for you then and I'm not trying to be a jerk here.

I used to run the tool repair department at a mom and pop tool store.

We sold Milwaukee as well as all the other big brands.

When you look at the tools we sold from Milwaukee, one that I remember clearly was the basic half-inch corded drill. The model we were able to buy said "Made in USA" on the riveted aluminum plate on the side. Home Depot down the road got a very similar looking drill, different model number and it said "Made in China" on the foil sticker. We weren't able to order the same the unit sold at Home Depot for half the price.

The average Joe didn't see the difference or could care less about the difference, all he thought was that we were ripping him off instead of the fact that Depot was selling an inferior product.

Makita had their "Maktek" junk brand but they didn't try to pass it off as Makita.

Granted, this was ten years ago and things may be different now but I still think that was playing pretty dirty.

I also didn't mean to imply that Ridgid, Ryobi and Milwaukee were equals, there's clearly a three-tier range there as far as quality and engineering goes. 

BTW, I still have my "Made in the USA" Orbital Super Sawzall and it still works great.

Retail is retail. Whoever you can pay the least that gets the job done 80% of the time is who you hire. Couple that with archaic inventory management systems and, well, you get the situation you just experienced. This is why I generally try to go to my local mom-and-pop hardware store for most things (yup, one still exists). Except for plants. Home depot does have a good selection of plants for reasonable prices.  

I've lost count of how many times I've been done with Home Depot...

Had some lowes fun last year. Went to get a chest freezer. They didn't have the one I wanted in stock, but would have it in 5days. Ok. So the guy in back gives me a card to take to the register up front and orders it.

5 days pass. I get the call that my freezer is in and come pick it up. I go to customer service to pick it up as instructed and they try to insist that I carried out the freezer the day I paid and basically accuse me of trying to steal another freezer. Wound up having to get irate and get the store manager involved who insists on going in back to pull security tape to see if I loaded a freezer in my car the day I paid. THIS IS AFTER THEY CALLED ME TO COME PICK IT UP.

No discount, no nothing, just- tape doesn't show you getting a freezer, here you go, here's one on a hand truck, go load it yourself.

I'm in the "they both stink" camp. HD is closer, so that is usually where I go to first.

I used to go to L more often when they gave me 5% off on purchases using my L credit card.  Stopped when they killed that promo - since i never carry a balance, they probably lost some $ on me... 

When I had an apartment in NH, I drove past a L (and a Target) every day after work. I shopped at those stores a lot. More recently, I was staying at a hotel in NH - right next to a HD (sometimes their damn forklift running would keep me awake at night). So I went to the HD if I happened to need something. Occasionally I'd buy some larger $ item in NH prior to coming home - no sales tax.

I usually use self-checkouts when I can. The less interaction with people, the better.

Sometimes their incompetence pays off.  A week before Christmas I bought something at Lowes for $499, their after Christmas flyer had it on sale for $399.  We're in lockdown so curbside pickup only, so I called asking how I could get the updated price without coming into the store.  They took my info, looked up the invoice and told me that they will put $223.56 on my credit card.  Being an honest idiot, I pointed out that $223 was too much money.  The person on the phone told me that I'm probably forgetting about tax.  She explained "the old price was $499, the new price is $399 which is a $100 discount and with tax is $223.56, so you'll get that much put back on your credit card."  They were supposed to email me an updated receipt but they never did so I have no idea how they possibly came up with that amount.  Sales tax here is 13% so it should have been $113.

In reply to Schmidlap :

13% sales tax?!?!?! Where is that?

I only go to Orange once a year for Ryobi stuff when it's on sale.  I have a Green and a Blue a stones throw from my house and used Green for almost everything until recently when they moved 90% of their lumber to a non-climate controlled outdoor area so you're guaranteed that any board you manage to find that is straight looks like a curly fry within 24 hours of being inside the garage.  Blue still keeps things indoors so I don't have as many issues so they have been getting more of my business.

I worked at both Lowes and Home Depot several years ago. I trained at different location and each store was different some successful and some were not. I worked when local hardware store had been all but closed most of my colleagues were refugees from working at local hardware stores, but have long retired. Both places actually pay very well and have decent benefits compared to other big box stores like Walmart. There are many opportunities to train. The training can be very vanilla and generic so you might get the gold star for being a expert, but not have a clue unless you had real experience. Typically stores have a lot of turn over, but usually have one grouch that works every other day that knows what to do, so if you don't catch that person you get the runaround, some of it's laziness and some of it is people trying to do things that don't know how to do and don't have the support or don't ask. At the end of the day they are big box stores and customer service is not the #1 priority. I have a local chain called Value Home Center that I pay a little extra because I know when I walk into the door I am greeted and they point me in the right direction for what I need. They sometimes have experts that can help with advice.

My orange and blues stores are 1/4 mile from each other about 5-6 miles away.  Blue seems to have less helpful workers and our store NEVER has those super close out specials that they put on Garage Journal all the time.