I have a "Pro" account at Home Depot. In theory it gets me better
pricing on bigger orders. The size orders I never make since I quit contracting. I decided to go ahead and order the rest of the shelves
for the other wall of the 40' container online yesterday, and have them delivered today. Time is money after all.

A few minutes after I placed the order I received an email letting me
know my Pro account had reached a "Perk Level." The perk turned out to
be $25 in Pro Bucks. Cool. With $25 Pro Bucks burning a hole in my
virtual pocket I went online and placed a $21 dollar order for a nice
Klein 11 way screwdriver with that nice padded rubber handle Klein is
famous for Valco inventing. It said it would be delivered today. (That
was yesterday.) My new shelves weren't even going to be delivered until
the next day (today). Wow! So Cool!

I was more excited about my new screwdriver than the shelves. About 20
minutes later I received an email letting me know my screwdriver order
was canceled, and if I wanted my Pro Bucks back I would have to stop
working, get in my truck spending my time and my gas to drive to their
local store, and stand in line at customer service to get a gift
certificate. That rubbed me the wrong way. Kinda reminded me of when
Home Depot started selling Rigid branded tools and offering a lifetime warranty, but made it so hard to actually warranty a tool it was hardly
worth it. I haven't bought a Home Depot Rigid tool in at least 15
years. I have heard its better now, but I still don't trust them.

Instead of shutting down machines and spending more of my time and money
than it was worth I went on the live chat and tried to get customer
service to just put the money back on the payment method. No. Oh by
the way, no. And um, no. They weren't having it, but about the third
time the chat agent told me I had to go to the store and stand in line
for my gift certificate I lost it.

"No. No, I do not have to go to the store. If I had wanted to go the
store I would have saved the $79 delivery fee on my net total 1785
dollar shelving order. How about you keep the 25 Pro Bucks and I'll
cancel the order for the shelving, and if you pull any games on that I
paid with PayPal. It might take a while, but I will get 100% of my real purchase back from PayPal without going to the store!"

They tried to "reasonable" me or "manage" me, but I had already gone
into my Home Depot Account and canceled the order. I kept arguing with
the live chat agent until I saw the automated functions of their website
showed my order as canceled. Then I told him to put the Pro Bucks where
the sun don't shine and disconnected.

PayPal shows the transaction as canceled this morning.

Typical rant. I know. Wah! Wah! Wah! Tell it to somebody who cares.
LOL.

The thing is I actually like the Home Deport shelf/racking for this application. I had actually found a similar style the same size a
little cheaper from CostCo. The CostCo shelving has two issues. There
is no CostCo in Yuma, and each section comes with only 4 shelves instead
of 5. Still I was going to do almost anything rather than buy from Home
Depot. Stubbornness like this rarely if ever makes a difference, but
I've always voted with my wallet.

I searched dozens of sources on line and read pages of search engine
results. The CostCo shelves were the only thing close enough to satisfy
me.

I added four sections of the CostCo shelving to the shopping cart on
their website. The Home Depot Shelves were 389. The CostCo Shelves
were 399 (more) discounted to 349 (less). Then the there was, "Add to
cart for final pricing." Okay lets see what the penalty, taxes, and
shipping add up to. There was no shipping charge. With taxes and a 5%
penalty for not being a CostCo member the total billed to my credit card
was $1087 delivered. That's apx $272 per set.

Since I'll be linking the shelving together (yes it is also link able)
I'll wind up with two extra uprights to add to my scrap metal pile.

The CostCo shelving will arrive on Tuesday, and I wrote the following
letter to Home Depot and posted it on their Facebook page on several
threads thanking them for saving me so much money.

Dear Home Depot,

I would like to thank you for the disingenuous (in my opinion) perk.
That resulted in $25 in pro bucks that in my opinion, you never intended
to honor. That perk came from an almost eighteen hundred dollar
purchase online. When you didn't honor the purchase I made with the pro
bucks, and you told me I had to stop working, and spend my time and gas
to go stand in line at the customer service desk at the local store in
order to get a gift certificate wasting more of my time and gas than it
was worth, I canceled the original purchase before you could process it.
I spent the next couple hours, yes I am aware of the irony, searching
for an alternative product that would fit the exact same application. I
found one at a savings of more than seven hundred dollars.

I want to thank you for what, in my opinion, can only at best be
described as embedded institutional deceptive practices. Thank you.

--
Bob La Londe
CNC Molds N Stuff


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