Are there any locally-owned building supply outlets convenient to you? If so, you will find more knowledgeable and probably more helpful people, and keep your money more in the community rather than send it down to us.

Just a thought.

Agreed with danf.

But I'd also chat up the store manager again, or similar. While you don't want to gain a rep as a difficult customer (and believe me, I have seen difficult customers -- I highly doubt you're one of them, so relax a little!), they also need to know that their customer service is servicing nobody, especially since Swan's End and its proprietress could possibly spend a fair chunk of change at Home Depot.

So... um... maybe if there's an anonymous comment box or something, that might help.

I will say that these are definite exceptions, rather than the rule. I've gotten some awesome customer service there. Last night for instance I took back a colour matched can of cream-coloured paint that had turned out to have a horrid greenish tinge. There were two guys at the paint counter. One was quite young, probably in his twenties. The other man was in his forties and I've dealt with him before, and always had great experiences. The young guy didn't seem to know what to do. I suggested that maybe I should wait and ask the other guy as soon as he was free, and that he (the young guy) could wait on the next person in line meanwhile. He did.

The older guy was awesome. He mixed me a new can of paint, and when that still wasn't right, mixed me a third can that was. Didn't cost me a penny either.

Do mention that too.

I don't know what it is, but our newest Ace Hardware has always been just full of people who seemed "lost," for lack of a better word. Every department. I wanted a patio table and I ended up listening to the guy talk about how he lived in an apartment downtown (in a creepy building); the woman on the other end of the store had to be led by me to the Command Adhesive; the paint guy took three tries to come up with something that came out tomatoey instead of bright red, no matter how many coats I used.

The one on the other side of town is about the size of my (tiny) apartment, but stacks its stuff absolutely floor-to-ceiling and cuts plexiglass for free. And they know evvvvvvverything.

I've had similarly frustrating encounters at our local big-box hardware store, though you're getting more actual words out of the employees than I have recently.

The last time (and I do mean "the LAST time") I tried to buy something at Lowe's, the only response I got from the fellow ostensibly helping me was a shrug and that slurry sound of "I-uh-oo" sound that is "I don't know" with all vowels and glottal stops.

Sounds about par for mass-market retailing. I was in a Walmart looking for an iPhone headset and the three people in electronics assured me they don't carry them. I found the headsets about 6 feet away.

As others have said try to find a local home and hardware place. We have one nearby and they not only know the general stuff they know what is needed for the old homes in this area.

I can't say I'm a lot happier with our big locally owned hardware store. They can answer questions there, but they always address the answers to my husband, even though I'm the only one asking (and the only one with a clue). The Fella now refuses to there with me because he gets so tired of them trying to engage him while remaining completely oblivious to me.

Last time I went there, I strode purposefully to the sanding-and-wood-treatment section only to get buttonholed by a clerk trying to redirect me to the wood polish section. (That's household cleaning, obvs, because DUH girls clean and boys do woodworking).

I used to do most of my hardware shopping at the expensive but locally-owned (and female-managed) hardware store in my neighborhood. Sad to say, they closed up last year. I loved having them nearby, and I would gladly pay more or wait for special-orders just for the pleasure of spending money somewhere I respected and where they also respected me.

I've always been pretty happy with the service from our version of Home Depot - Bunnings, which has pretty much cornered the entire hardware market in Australia by buying almost all competitors. One thing that I like is that the staff are pretty much all trade qualified - the guy in the plumbing section is an actual plumber, the guy in the timber yard is a carpenter etc ('guy' in this instance is not restricted to males, BTW - I sometimes enjoy watching some smart-arse male customer look stupid by patronising female staff ;-). Most of them work in the store evenings and weekends as a second job, so they are current in their industry knowledge and, in my experience, mostly good at gauging the knowledge of the customer pretty quickly - once they realise I know what I'm talking about even though I might not have the correct terminology, they always change their approach, where my partner gets the 'dumbed-down' version without all the jargon. I do have an underlying unease with a situation where a company pretty much has a monopoly, but it works pretty well. Plus, they're open until 9:00 pm weeknights and all weekend, unlike most of the smaller places.

I have one:

Me: Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but I just accidentally dropped and spilled a can of paint over in the garden section.

Home Depot Employee: [seeing my hands covered in paint] Okay. We'll get you a hazmat suit and a mop to clean it up.

Me: ???

Home Depot Employee: Just kidding. We'll clean it up. You'll just have to pay for the paint.

Me: [silence]

Home Depot Employee: Just kidding. You don't have to pay for it. Show me where it is.

[walking to spill]

Home Depot Employee: Here, do you want to wipe your hands off on my apron?

Me: Yes, thanks.

Home Depot Employee: Oh, I thought it was like a 5 gallon bucket. And this is primer, not paint. We'll take care of it.

Me: Thanks! Sorry!

Home Depot Employee: No problem.

I encountered a bizarre problem at my local hardware store a few years ago. I was shoveling icy snow, and the shovel cracked, so I went to buy a new one. I walk in, the two guys there greet me, and I tell them I need a snow shovel. "We don't have any." This is January, and they don't have snow shovels? I thought maybe he was joking, but he wasn't. "Well, when will you have any?" They don't know. They have no idea. They shrugged. And, they tell me, not only do they not have any snow shovels, NOBODY IN TOWN has any snow shovels, anywhere. What??

So I left, and went over to Home Depot, and they had about 40 snow shovels, one of which I bought. Then, just because I was pissed, I went by Lowe's, and they had even more. Kmart had about 20.

What the hell was going on? I do not know. I'd shopped there before, and never had problems. It was like for some reason they just didn't even want to try to do business with me. I never have figured it out.

In one of my local Lowes, I regularly get treated as if I couldn't possibly know what I'm doing. A guy and I enter at the same time. He gets asked if he needs help 2-3 tines. Me: 15 times, and it is as if they're afraid I'm going to get lost if allowed to wander and be unable to find my way out, and will be found in a fetal ball 3 days later in the pegboard section, crying in fear.

I ask an associate for a specific unusual tool to seal grout, and I'll get a condescending lecture on how I shouldn't be scared of grouting and that I'll need to make sure I do all the right steps (which are explained to me in cutesy terms), and I am sitting there trying not to scream. Surely the fact that I am asking for specific product I know they stock indicates that I might have grouted something - or 5000 things - before.

OR I pick up some epoxy, and cut through the nails/fasteners aisle, and the fasteners associate stops me as I'm zipping through and wants to double check what I have to make sure I didn't make a mistake. You don't want to get the wrong thing, he will say jovially. "Now are you sure wanted to get this Epoxy? It's pretty strong stuff. There's probably something better for whatever you are doing. There's some regular elmer's glue up by the register." I resist punching him or snarkily telling him I am actually literate and read the back of the dang packaging.

I went to go get some plumbing fixtures and electrical tape to make a Minty the Candy Cane Who Fell on the Floor for my brother to give to his wife, and an associate said to me "Plumbing's a pretty big task, there. You should get someone to help you. Or you could call someone!"

This is why I no longer go to that particular Lowes. The one in the Valley (an equal distance away) seems to be staffed by people who assume you are able and competent.

(There's a Home Despot near that Lowes that I have issues with, too, mostly because I think that having no checkers on duty at 3pm on a weekday and making people use the self-checkouts sucks when I am trying to scan multiple 50+ lb bags of concrete by moving them over that damn grocery-style scanner - or am buying lots of small bags of screws and nuts and bolts and the bag holder doesn't recognize it when they are put in the bag because they weight .5 OZ apiece. The system goes into lockdown after 3 times aren't registered as being in the bag and requires someone with a key to let you complete the transaction.)

Hi, I work at Home Depot.

On the bottom of every Home Depot receipt you will see a little thing that tells you to go online and take a survey that will enter you into a contest to win a $5000 gift card. The survey is long but it is taken very, very seriously. It's called VOC - voice of the customer - and associates and stores live and die by their VOC scores. So if you have negative or positive feedback, that's the best way to leave it. I assure you it is looked at.

Giving good customer service is the major, major thing at Home Depot. That's the big push - it's what differentiates us from Lowes (also, we are slightly cheaper.) However, there are several problems that can impact service. One of them is that the training is pretty much for shit. It's all computer based and at least at my store, nobody takes it seriously - you spend your first week sitting in front of a computer doing online simulations and then that's it, boom, you're on the floor. Which is nothing like the computer. Everyone is crazy busy all the time, so there's really very little hands on training. That means that new people are kind of in a sink or swim type position and it can be very frustrating.

The other big problem is that Home Depot has not raised their starting pay for at least 15 years. No, seriously. I make $8.15 an hour, which is what my friend Jim made at Home Depot in 1996. Whee! Not like the cost of living has increased in that time or anything, huh? That generous pay scale makes me and many other Home Depot employees eligible for food stamps. You get what you pay for - word is that Lowes pays better but has a less relaxed work environment - and unless the associate has been there a long time, they're not making bank, so many of us aren't as motivated as we could be.

Home Depot schedules their staff based on what the store manager projects will be their weekly earnings. Our store has been really slow this spring (the recession is not over, not here) and so everyone's hours have been cut and that means we are understaffed a lot. It's a bad self reinforcing cycle. There should always be at least three cashiers on duty at all times and we would never have just self checkout open at 3 on a weekday, so I don't get that. Self checkout, by the way, sucks and should be abolished for all the reasons julen has stated. I wish they would get rid of it - when you're the cashier on self checkout, you have to run a regular register as well as monitor four additional registers. It's not fun. Really you should only use it if you have a few clearly marked items, not screws or concrete.

Like everywhere, Home Depot is staffed by individuals and some of them are creeps. Most of the people at my store are really awesome. Many of them, like me, are victims of the recession - on our registers we have me, with 20 years of museum experience in everything from education to communications, a woman with 17 years in corporate HR who has moved six times in the last two years trying to find a job, a woman with 20 years of sales and marketing who doesn't want to move away but can't find anything and a woman who used to be the top manager at an Office Depot until they decided to fire all their senior people because they were making too much money. At least half our store staff in every department are women, so you will not be condescended to here, which is nice. Although that one guy in plumbing is, yes, a creep. The other three people are really cool, though.

Thanks for the inside view, mygothlaundry. It's great to hear that the surveys are taken so seriously, so customer feedback can actually make a difference. (I'm a big believer in giving polite and specific feedback to businesses when I get especially good or especially bad service.) And it's true that the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances who work in big-box stores of any kind are intelligent, competent, helpful, and vastly over-qualified.

I must admit: the last few times I've been to a big-box hardware store (and that's been Lowe's, which is right in the route where we do errands), I've ended quietly up putting back my items on the shelf and leaving empty-handed, usually uttering a sigh of disgust. Even if Lowe's had a survey on the receipt, I wouldn't have gotten to the point of getting a receipt. Last time this happened, I decided to save time and simply stop going there.

Doing some errands with my mother this winter, I gaped in surprise when she pulled into a hidden lot and --- hey, there's a Home Depot here! I forgot it existed! It's hidden from the road! Or something! I'm not sure how I could have completely forgotten a store that size, but I did. So now I'm torn: keep buying locally from The Male Privilege Store? Or break away from my desire to Buy Local? Phew, that's a toughie.

it is as if they're afraid I'm going to get lost if allowed to wander and be unable to find my way out, and will be found in a fetal ball 3 days later in the pegboard section, crying in fear.

... little do they know, I am only reduced to tears when I get turned around in a mall or an outlet shoe store. Lost in a hardware store? Oh, bestill my heart! I could while away a happy few hours in a hardware store.

Speaking of which, I won a $100 dollar Sears gift card, and I am buying myself a cordless drill! WHOOO HOOOOOO!

Oh and hey, I forgot to mention something else kind of cool, which is that all Home Depot employees are able to offer you discounts. Say that you want something cheaper and there's a good chance you'll get it - I mean, up to a certain point. ;-) We will also honor all other store's coupons and sale prices - in fact, we'll meet & beat brick & mortar competitor prices by 10% if you bring us a printed sale flyer and you can do that right at the register. They don't publicize this for some reason (if I was in charge of their marketing I would change some stuff, also, I would spell fluorescent right, ARGH) but it's really handy to know.

An ACE Hardware Store opened up near me lately. They are all independently-owned franchises. This place isn't always as cheap as Home Depot, but they have most of what I need, short of major lumber supplies. And it's a short bicycle ride from my house. And I can leave my bike by the front counter inside the store and they think it's cool.

MGL, if that comment was on MeFi, it would be sidebarred. Yowsa!

I love Home Depot. I get good service at the 2 I go to. There's a huge, locally-owned hardware store 25 minutes away, but they have limited hours, so I go there if I need more help than usual, or if I'm in that area, I'll just go browse. Locally-owned anything is becoming rare, and that Office Depot story is a sad illustration of why Corpocracy sucks.