Sunday, October 25, 2009

HDFail

Just a little followup to yesterday's post. We went to the Home Depot of my choice.

Mistake.

We made a beeline directly to the kitchen cabinets aisle, deciding to look at their "off-the-rack" section first to see if there was anything there. It turned out that in that section, you had a choice of white, white, or white cabinets. And they were all the types that have to be assembled when you get them home. A really nice salesman came by and asked if he could help us. GF says, "Are these the only choices you have? Aren't there any other colors?" Nice salesguy says, "What color were you looking for?" GF says, "Not white." Salesguy says "You can order any color you'd like. It'll only take 2-3 weeks for delivery."

He suggested we go upstairs to the Design Center where there would be more choices. (He also mentioned that the other Home Depot -- the one I didn't want to go to -- would have more in-stock choices. Traitor!)

So, we went upstairs. Here's the successful part of having gone upstairs. It wasn't crowded. In fact, we were the only customers up there. That totally met one of my wishes for a successful, happy shopping experience. It was also the only thing about going upstairs that rated in the plus column.

We walked around and looked at the spectacularly gorgeous kitchen displays. I opened one cabinet door to see the price on that particular display. $14, 598.32! Really? REALLY? I moved on to the next display. Ugly as sin, but only $2,943.00.

Then we got a little more systematic about the whole thing. Kitchen cabinets are priced by the linear foot. We looked around a bit and figured out that for a rental apartment, we really wanted to spend about $50 per linear foot. We knew that was more or less a fantasy, but we have a right to dream. Steve had suggested we look at KitchenAid cabinets because that'd keep his neighbors employed. We might decide to follow Steve's advice when we buy new cabinets for ourselves, but not for the new neighbors upstairs we haven't even met yet. I doubt we'll like them enough to spend $117 to $320 per linear foot on their kitchen.

Here's another thing about going upstairs that fell into the fail column. I mentioned that we were the only customers up there. I neglected to mention that we were the only people up there. We looked around for about a 1/2-hour before a saleswoman put in an appearance. She showed up as we were making our exit. I honestly don't recall any of the exact sentences involved in our badinage, but I can tell you that the HD saleswoman oozed "Don't-give-a-shit" with every word she uttered and from every pore in her body. That's O.K. We didn't give a shit by then either.

Later this morning, we'll be going to the big, giant, scary HD in Red Hook. And since it's Sunday, the Hassidic DIYers will be out in force as well. Oh, joy. (Before anyone gives me crap about singling out the Hassids, let me just remind you that one of the cornerstones of their belief is that they're commanded to repopulate the earth with Jews and they take that commandment seriously. They have lots of kids and they take all of them on Sunday trips and the kids think they're at Disney World and...Oh, leave me alone -- I'm allowed to be annoyed by anyone I want to be annoyed by.) (Side note: The other day at work, a couple of us were discussing which ethnic group it was still safe to dis in movies and realized that the list has been narrowed down to only the Amish -- because they're not going to watch your stinkin' movie anyway. I'll be writing the next 007 movie with an evil nemesis named Stolzfus bent on world domination and he'll have a secret weapon made out of hand-carved wooden dowels and pegs and stuff and it'll -- eventually -- fling a giant wooden wagon wheel at the big city and...OK, this idea needs some work.)

BTW -- There was a line, so I didn't even get a hot dog out of yesterday's adventure.

1 comment:

Steve Buchheit said...

Silly Nathan, we know most Amish names are Yoder or Miller.