Lowe’s and other such nonsense.

So, this one has been years in the making. I have had probably 100 similar experiences exactly like this one. I don’t know how many of you have had the utter joy and privilege of spending any time in a large chain hardware store, but if you haven’t, please go in and bask in the unbridled incompetence and apathy of a business where the mission statement is…”Who Cares.”

I have worked in some form of the trades for around 20 years now, and regardless of what trade you are in, there will always be a necessity to make a trip to pick up some random item from the hardware store. On some occasions, I would be able to go to our local hardware store, which, quite frankly, has the opposite customer service mindset of our big box store, Lowe’s. (There is a pretty great scene in Parks and Recreation where Ron Swanson walks in to Lowe’s and when asked by an employee if he needs help. He stops, looks the kid in the eye and says, “I know more than you.” This is 100% me.)

I don’t mind mentioning the name of our small local store, because even with my level of sarcasm, I really can’t say enough in favor of G.R. Smith. In the true essence of this blog, I’m not going to spend too much time talking about how wonderful G.R. Smith is, but rather how incredibly terrible Lowe’s is. The minute you walk in G.R. Smith, you are met every ten seconds by an employee asking you what they can help you with, and then walking you directly to the location of that item. The only negative I could mention, and it’s a stretch, is that they are almost TOO helpful.

Lowe’s, by comparison, pushes an experience that would indicate that the employees have some sort of contest going to see how uncomfortable and forlorn they can make each customer feel, assuming that the customer can even find an employee in this intentionally crafted game of hide and seek.

Last night, after checking the quantity of a stock white ceramic tile online, I went into Lowe’s to pick up the tile. The computer said they had 4,500 tiles on hand, and I only needed about 1,200. Seems like a simple transaction, yes? There were only a couple half-smashed boxes on the shelf, so I asked the employee in the next aisle for help locating it.

The way he rolled his eyes above his COVID mask elevated my blood pressure a couple of degrees.

He walked down the aisle and looked for like 20 seconds at some boxes on the top shelf, and then said, “I don’t see any, but let me go find someone who works in flooring.”

Ok, fine. So I waited.

After about 5 minutes, I walked over to the flooring desk and asked a (different) employee sitting there what the story was.

“Oh did you need help?”

Yes, dummy. Y’all won’t let me climb all over the shelving units looking for stuff myself, so I am unfortunately resigned to the corporate guideline of needing assistance from someone being paid by Lowe’s to sit on their ass and avoid customer contact.

“You already asked someone? Who? Oh, he just went to lunch.”

Great. I hope I never get to a point where someone is in need of my help and halfway through the process of looking for someone else to delegate that to, I look at my watch and think… “Screw them. It’s Hot Pocket time.”

After another 10 minutes, she comes back and explains that the only guy that knows where that tile is located is on break, so it’ll be a few minutes. The guy finally comes out, they spend yet another 10 minutes setting up the aisle barriers and she wanders into the adjacent aisle and engages in conversation with someone else about school starting up again.

In the meantime the guy on the forklift is repeatedly asking loudly if the next aisle is clear… to no one in particular. Wait, that’s not true. He was asking HER, because it was HER job to yell back at him that the aisle was clear so he could legally get my mother-loving tiles off the top shelf without the risk of dropping them into the next aisle and crushing a guy that had been staring at shelf paper for 30 minutes.

When he finally gets it down, he asks me (jokingly I hope) if I would buy the entire pallet so it would save him the trouble of stacking the boxes individually on the bottom shelf….where they should have been ALL ALONG.

Both employees brought up the fact that a different customer a couple days earlier had been in there looking for the same tile and they hadn’t been able to locate it. I feel like that is the quintessential Lowe’s experience, what that customer had enjoyed. You come in for a specific thing, and maybe you can find one employee to half-assed look for it, and then you accept defeat and walk away as a loser.

To cap off this evening, the guy that got the tile down said loudly to his co-worker, “I sure hope lifting these boxes doesn’t make me tear my stitches. I don’t know what Lowe’s will do about that!”

Hopefully let you bleed out and bury you in one of the mulch pits out in the garden area. I’ve been out there too.

With the helpful enthusiasm of the outdoor department workers, you’d never be discovered unless a customer dug you up with their own hands.