A New Year’s resolution I can fully support!

Daphne, one of the contributors to Jaded Haven, writes about her New Year resolution: to avoid big-box stores.

I spent an hour at Best Buy this morning and walked out without buying the item I came to purchase. My son needs a laptop, they had the model I wanted in stock, unfortunately they only had one sales associate for the ten people milling around the computer department. I was number two in line, but the guy in front of me had three million questions and didn’t seem to give a shit that others were patiently waiting for attention. The manager I hunted down didn’t seem to give a shit either. I bought the thing from the company direct online after I got home. Free shipping, too.

Lowes didn’t schedule anyone to staff the paint department at ten in the morning last Tuesday. After a futile, thirty minute wait for the manager to find someone to mix up a can of white, I headed over to the ceiling fan section and discovered nobody on staff there either. The small Benjamin Moore store got my paint business and a local lighting company snagged two hundred bucks in a quick exchange.

Macy’s shoe department gave me a migraine. Two harried girls trying to wait on fifty women does not make for a pleasant shopping experience. At Marni’s, a little jewel box of a local shop, the charming owner waited on me and had three less pairs of shoes in stock when I walked out the door thirty minutes later.

The checkers at Target and Walmart appear to be drugged on Thorazine, deciphering the balkanized Spanglish or Ebonics at fast food drive-thru’s is an endemic pastime and suffering the illiterate thugs working the return desk at any big box store is a brutal nightmare.

I am tired of being treated like rabble, a cockroach annoyance that must be endured by the hired help when I choose to take my time and money to shop at these anonymous places of business. Yes, I’ll spend a little more out-of-pocket going local and small, but at least I won’t feel enraged, disgusted or abused when I walk out the door. I might even feel quite satisfied after spending my money.

There’s more at the link.

I’m with Daphne on this one. I’ve gotten fed up with lousy service from the big-box stores more times than I can tell. I’ll go to them for the basics like groceries, T-shirts and the like, but if I want something more expensive, or where I’ll need some advice and guidance, I’ve more and more turned to smaller, more knowledgeable suppliers. It may cost more, but it saves me a great deal of aggravation!

Now, if we can just get companies to locate their help desks in America, and staff them with Americans, rather than use foreign call centers where the staff speak little or no English and have accents so thick as to be almost incomprehensible . . .

Peter