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Floored by Lowe's and Armstrong
I really hate it, when I don't know whom I should be mad at.
I was faced with this conundrum recently at Lowe's. I go to Lowe's quite a bit. When you're renovating an old house, visits there are a necessity. Matter of fact, Lowe's could save me a significant amount of time if they'd just put in a grocery aisle. I would never have to go to Wal-Mart or Schnuck's if they did that.
One of my recent house projects is installing a laminate floor. A lot of laminate floor. We originally were going to carpet the second floor foyer and bedrooms, but decided that a nice hardwood floor would look better.
Refinishing the existing tongue and groove pine floor was out of the question. While a previous owner of the house had removed the linoleum and carpet that had once covered it, the floor painting they did just barely disguised the fact it was a sub-floor that was never intended to be seen. Refinishing it would be the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.
So instead we found a nice laminate floor at Lowe's that we liked. The sign at the store indicated that the model had a new lower price that shaved nearly 50 cents a square foot off the old one. The sample we took home looked good next our existing woodwork and I particularly liked the fact that the floor had a texture to it rather than being artificially smooth like a lot of laminates. Handscraped Hickory it was called. It was made by Armstrong.
While I have been guilty of buying remodeling supplies and not getting them installed right away, this floor was different. One of the rooms was ready for the flooring to go down, so after waiting two days to let the flooring get acclimated, I installed it.
It installed easily and looks both fantastic and appropriate to the age of the 100-year-old house.
Originally, we bought enough to finish 2 of the 3 bedrooms and the large foyer with the intent that we'd buy more to finish the last bedroom and do the kitchen when we were ready in a few months. I saw no point in buying and warehousing the floor if Lowe's was going to continue carrying it. And since I'd been told that it was one of Lowe's better selling laminate floors I figured I had nothing to worry about.
A couple weeks go by and I'm out at Lowe's -- surprise, surprise -- and happen down the laminate flooring aisle where I notice that the display for the Handscraped Hickory is empty. Not only that, no boxes of my flooring are anywhere in sight. I cornered a flooring manager and he gave me the bad news.
Armstrong had discontinued the model and this particular manager had sold the remaining stock from the local Lowe's store the night before.
Aaaaaaaarrrrrgggh! Damn Armstong!
But the manager was quite helpful. He checked the inventory for that particular flooring at all of the other "nearby" Lowe's stores and gave me some good news. While the Sikeston store was essentially sold out, they had over 60 boxes in Carbondale, 150 in Paducah and 130 in Farmington.
But then he gave me more bad news.
Normally, Lowe's would ship the flooring free of charge from one of the other stores, but because this was a "discontinued product" they couldn't do that. The manager didn't know why. That's just the policy, he told me. If I wanted more of this flooring, I'd have to go get it.
Aaaaaaaarrrrrgggh! Damn Lowe's!
What an asinine policy, but what are you going to do? You can futilely complain to the store's management about this nonsensical corporate policy, or you can do what I did.
I took off work the afternoon of the following Friday and drove to Carbondale with my wife. She went to some stores she wanted to go to and I got enough boxes of flooring to complete our project. Then on the way home, we grabbed an early dinner at the 17th Street Grill in Murphysboro. Basically, we made the best of a not so good situation.
After we got back to town and I unloaded the 26 boxes, we had to run out to Wal-Mart for some OJ and bread and a few other basics.
There's nothing I hate worse than going to Wally World on a Friday or Saturday night, but what are you going to do? After all, Lowe's doesn't have grocery aisle.
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