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A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
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Previous: Home "improvement" projects | Main | Next: (Just for fun) Application name
December 8, 2006 10:17 AM
Broken: Home Depot, being investigated
Home Depot Investigated For Scammy Remodelling Services - Consumerist. I've experienced some of the same problems with Home Depot myself.
Home Depot claims you won't have to deal with subcontractors, but they do use subcontractors. When something goes wrong, and consumers complain, Home Depot avoids or ignores their repeated phone calls and letters.
This is EXTREMELY sad. I've heard that CEO's aren't that greedy as most people portray it to be, but THIS is a major exception.
I guess I will be shopping at Lowe's.
My only experience with Home Depot's installation services went pretty well, though they could have been a lot worse. They used a subcontractor, and they gave him a different door than what I ordered (I was getting a residential front door installed and they gave him some sort of door suitable for an industrial warehouse!), but fortunately the subcontractor actually had the decency to ask me if it was the right door before he started any work. As a result the installation was pushed back a day but other than that it went pretty smoothly.
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Previous: Home "improvement" projects | Main | Next: (Just for fun) Application name
Now I'm glad that my Expo curtain debacle fell through.
I went to buy curtains for the first floor of my house and for my son's room at Expo, back when they were still open here in Denver. We had the perfect fabrics picked out, and I shelled out the $100 for them to come professionally measure my windows. (They refused to make the curtains if they hadn't measured them themselves, which is sort of understandable, but I compared my measurements with theirs and they were the same.)
I paid the $1600 for the curtains. I got a call a few days later saying that one of the fabrics I had picked was out of stock, and could I please drive back down to Expo (an hour away) to pick out another fabric. This happened several more times, until every room wasn't getting the fabric that we had originally selected, and we had chosen THREE different fabrics for my son's room. They were literally out of fabric suitable for a little boy's room. When they called again to say they were out of stock on another of the fabrics, I told them to just refund my Home Depot card for the cost of the curtains and hardware since I didn't have time to deal with it right then, and I'd come down in a month or two to try again.
A few weeks later, it was announced that Expo was closing most of their stores. I had to call several times to get a refund on the window measurements.
I sure enjoyed shopping their out-of-business sales, though!
Posted by: Alice H at December 8, 2006 12:02 PM