The Home Depot Experience

On a Saturday morning in late summer, Brent had come by the house to teach me how to install a new muffler on the Honda Accord. I hadn't slept well in the last few days so the early work came for me at a slow pace. Once the old rusted muffler was off the car, it soon became clear that we needed to buy new bolts to replace the corroded ones.

We got in the car and went in the direction of the mall. They didn't have the pieces we needed at Menards so we left quickly. Both of us had to work later in the day and time was a sudden luxury. Before leaving, however, I caught a glimpse of a Halloween section that Menards was preparing for the upcoming Fall season. My thoughts dwelled on how fast time flies. Summer's all but over and it's time again for life to enter a new cycle.

In our haste, we went across the street to the Home Depot. As a product of a national chain of home improvement stores, the place was rather well organized and they carried what we needed. There was a little confusion though about how one pays for the nuts and bolts we picked out. Though the prices were clearly labeled in the little bins, do we simply report the correct price or will they have a particular scheme? We soon found out at the register.

As Brent was saying, at Farm and Fleet they mark all their hardwares by color codes and you pay by the pound. This is the local business mentality at work and I'm sure it runs efficiently. At Home Depot, we walk up to one of the many registers. Betsy, a blond hottie, greets you with a welcome smile. You'd expect a cute girl like her to work other jobs but she's hanging in there with the guys. She tries to ring us in but here lies the kinks of a system probably developed by the big corporate mentality.

We notice that she's trying to input these small printed codes from each nut and bolt. With the scant surface area, the pricing code is not complete and she needs to look up the information. She calls on the overhead line for hardwares even though the bins we had picked out our wares from was only fifteen yards away. We could have easily just gone back and brought the entire bin but she assures us that it's not necessary. Brent interjects and tells her right out what's the cost. We spend another five minutes looking at a two inch thick manual with pricing codes before she receives approval to just manually pick a code that matched our price. Ten minutes later and $1.77 rung up, we pay and make our way home. I wish I could've just paid her the $2.00 and bypass the time wasted.

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Activity: 2 | Energy: 1 | Friends: 2