Dear Home Depot,

Yesterday you lost a sale.  A guaranteed sale at that.  Now, after my experience last night, I am not sure that I need, or even WANT the item that I was going to purchase.  And if I do but it, I will probably NOT be buying it from your store, at least not the one that I was at last night.

If you are still reading this, here is the entire story.  When finishing our lower level, one of the things that I wanted was to have a refrigerator so that we would not have to constantly be running upstairs for drinks and snacks if we are entertaining in the lower level. So, you can see that this is not an item I NEED to have.  It is something that would be nice, but in the large scheme of things, isn’t going to kill me if I don’t have it.

Yesterday, we were in the Twin Cities area for some graduation parties, and thought, this might be a good day to get that refrigerator.  We live about 60 miles from the nearest Home Depot, and just about anything else for that matter.  We stopped at a home depot on the way down to see if they carried a model I would want. They did, so we arraigned borrowing a trailer from my dad.  We stopped at a different store to see about expanded selection, the first HD we stopped at is a smaller store and doesn’t have the widest selection. From here we went to two graduation parties and stopped at a second HD store to look at fridges.

After the graduation parties, we picked up the trailer and stopped at the closest HD on the way home.  Here is where stuff gets bad. This was the third store I had taken all 4 kids into.  They had not behaved well in the other two stores, and by this time, they were hungry to boot.  This was not a great  time to be look at anything other than a fast food joint.  The third store has several models to choose from.  I was trying to look at them with my beautiful Bride, while all for Nuts ran amok all over, opening ovens, dishwashers, etc.  I am sure you can imagine the scene right now.  The salesperson came over, we told her we were looking for a refrigerator for the basement, in a wet-bar type or area ( big mistake there ), so she tried to move us toward the mini-fridge, which I do not want.  After I stated that I wanted to BUY a certain model, and that I wanted to take it with my TODAY, she went to look it up in their system.  They have two in stock, the floor model and one “in the warehouse”.  She was going to go back and make sure it was there.  After about 10 minutes, she comes back. They CAN’T find it.  Many excuses about the state of the warehouse, etc.  But come on, it’s a REFRIGERATOR.  It is in a REALLY BIG BOX!  

There is more to this that I can write at this point.  My only really problem with Home Depot is that this salesperson was very unprepared to deal with actually selling something that I wanted and she should have called for help much earlier that she did, or tried to do.  Once it because apparent that I was frustrated and was going to leave, she didn’t try to save the sale.  She only had excuses, and none of them were sufficient for me.

I left without a fridge and at this point I wonder if I really need one at this time.