Lowe’s and Home Depot Frustrations
With the marriage now approaching the completion of its sixth month, we’ve been busy nesting. In doing so, we’ve been adding to the kitchen. We contracted with Home Depot to install an island. And now we’re contracting with Lowe’s to install new counter tops. However, we’ve experienced much frustration with each company.
In regards to the island, I think your Home Depot experience varies greatly depending upon the employees you are able to work with. In our case, we found that the Home Depot people were light on product knowledge and weren’t very competent with the CAD software that they were apparently forced to use. It was excruciating to watch our assigned representative try to represent our design in that software. At one point, I almost suggested that we just use pencil and paper. We made no less than four weekend trips to work through the simple design. Thereafter, we had to work with their inflexible contractors who could only work on certain days and at certain hours of those days. It was far from a great customer experience.
And here we go again…this time with Lowe’s. We’re using Lowe’s because we hated Home Depot. Its early in the process, but I found out yesterday that the counter top installers would be unable to turn off the water or gas and that I might have to do that myself. Apparently, its a liability issue. So even while we’re paying several thousand for this job, we can’t get them to throw in this expertise to make this a total turnkey job. As a customer, this pisses me off since I must now school myself on each of these items that they cannot do. When I complained, the Lowe’s rep said, "You’re a handy guy, aren’t you?" My reply: "For the money I’m paying you for this, I didn’t have to be handy."
But alas, there is a solution. For a cool $160, they’ll arrange for a company to come out to take care of both the water and the gas. In my opinion, that’s a line item I shouldn’t see. Just throw that in!
So given all this, I don’t know whether to root for Tony Stewart (the 20 car) or Jimmy Johnson (the 48 car). But at least now I see where some of my money is going.