I pit Lowe's

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

Yeah, this is MPSIMS. That’s where most of my pit threads end up.

But what the hell? I just want four terra cotta clay pots, and a bag of Miracle Gro potting soil. Moisture Control[sup]®[/sup], if you nosey detail oriented Dopers must know.

I should have been in and out of there in five minutes or less. Instead, there’s one little old lady working the cash register in the outdoor garden center. Poor dear, I’m not blaming her. But apparently everything out there is on sale (except my stuff) and she can’t ring anything without a manager standing there. Guess what was missing from the picture? A FUCKING MANAGER.

After five minutes in line waiting for some pimply faced manager to show up so this poor woman can actually do her job, I give up in disgust and go inside.

The fucking store’s got to be five acres of shit piled to the rafters with crap to buy, and they’ve got like a quarter mile of checkouts. They’re numbered one to 25, for crying out loud.

There’s not a single checkout open. Oh, they’ve got dozens of employees scurrying around here and there trying to be helpful. But not one fucking cashier!

There are two lanes of “self checkout.” Great, those always run smoothly. There’s one, exactly one employee helping everyone fucking up their self checkout purchases.

That’s it.

Could some hotshot MBA Doper please explain to me how this is a good business plan? Put lots of stuff on sale, put one little old lady out in the garden center WHO CAN’T SELL ANYTHING THAT’S ON SALE WITHOUT A MANAGER, then give all your managers & cashiers the day off?

Do they really teach that to MBAs these days?

#2

Sundays are a terrible day to shop.

  1. It is the end of the work week for many places. Many managers are told, No overtime, no exceptions. Thus, they’re likely to be understaffed.

  2. It is a day for call offs. Hungover employees or people who know that it is easier to call off than to get the day off approved adds to the short staffing.

#3

Bingo. This is also bad business, but it’s closer to accounting than business practices.

#4

I can’t recall which day of the week it was when I took my 80-year-old mom into Lowe’s, but here’s why she’s soured on that place:
She asked about hiring someone from there to come out and put a railing on the porch. She had brought in the measurements of the three support posts, etc. They told her that the job was too small for them, that they could not customize/cut the railing to fit between her posts, and then told her to buy some materials and do it herself. Right.

Okay, maybe they don’t do small jobs. But I don’t buy the “couldn’t cut to fit” story, because she later found a local company to do the whole thing plus a couple of gates and it didn’t freaking matter about the measurements.

#5

I usually prefer Lowe’s to Home Depot, but Saturday we had a bad experience in the self-checkout line.
The SO and I stopped in for one item and quickly scooted over to the empty self-checkout line, thinking it would be faster than waiting in the regular lines, which were all long.
He tried to pay for his item with his Lowe’s corporate credit card (he’s a contractor), and the register refused it, popping up the message, “We cannot process that type of card at this time.”
The cashier manning the self-checkouts came over and rang him up on her register, but it completely defeated the whole purpose of the self-checkouts.

#6

There’s is a Lowe’s within walking distane of where I live which, since I don’t drive, makes it my hardware store of choice. However, I’ve getting a bit irked with them recently. I decided to build some custom bookcases for my paperbacks, and drew up plans using two foot lengths of half-inch “craft board” (pine or whitewood) for the shelves. I was going to need about twenty of these so after picking up the dozen they had out on the floor I asked if they had any more in stock. The person I spoke to checked and said they didn’t, then checked again and said that they had some on order and it would be arriving in four or five days. I came back a week later and they didn’t have any; I asked, wondering if maybe someone had beaten me to them. No, they hadn’t arrived yet. maybe a few more days. Two weeks later they still hadn’t arrived. I had tried the Home Depot a little further away, but they don’t carry them. I need to check again this week.

Although they were very good about cutting my lumber to size at no charge, which is good because there isn’t room in my apartment to set up a table saw.