Omg what a night. Panda and I were going to move some boxes, but we ended up spending over six hours at Home Depot haggling over blinds. At first we got help selecting options by a rep of one of the brands of blinds, which probably took an hour. Then we sat down with a store sales associate to work out a price quote and discovered that what we were told didn’t cost extra actually did. PLUS for awhile the type of wood we wanted wasn’t even showing up in the system and we had to figure out why the pricing wasn’t matching up. Ugh. Sooo we reworked everything and then haggled for a better deal because of the misinformation and trouble that we went through, but the assistant manager didn’t even seem to care and took no responsibility for our experience.

They could totally tell Panda’s an engineer when he brought in this diagram.

Granted, it wasn’t Home Depot’s fault, but I do consider it their problem. After all they’re the ones selling us the blinds and the manager didn’t even apologize that it was such a hassle. Whether or not it’s their fault, they should take some responsibility for the experience we had. We weren’t being offered anything that a normal customer coming in with a completely smooth transaction would have gotten. What sort of goodwill is that, after hours upon hours of time spent for wasted effort due to a breakdown in communication? After much back and forth, we finally got offered something beyond the discounts already in place and I struggled to decide if I wanted to take the deal. If I was going to go for blinds of that quality level, I wasn’t going to get a better deal than what was on the table. However, did I want to do business with these people after it was so much trouble??

Panda was pretty keen on getting them because of the pricing and time we’d already invested in the process. We discussed for a long time and I finally decided I was ok with it if we didn’t buy anything else there (we were going to get a washer dryer set, overhead lighting, and many other random things there too). This sort of transaction left a bad taste in my mouth, but it is so steeply discounted compared to anything else we’d be able to find that I didn’t want to just walk away. Once we finally decided to go for it, we started the tedious process of finishing the quote and applying for a Home Depot card. Panda’s application was denied due to some confusion with our current address and verifying his identity, so I opened one up. There were many hiccups with my application and it took nearly an hour on the phone to get it all sorted out.

So finally, we wrapped up at 10 as they were closing… after arriving around 3:30 that afternoon. I don’t even know how our day got away like that. I mean, I thought I disliked shopping before, but now I pretty much hate it. So much trouble!! But at least we walked away with a good deal.