Replacing Our Dryer or How We Spent Our Saturday Evening

N spent Sat. trying to revive/repair our dryer. After several hours, we decided it was time to replace it. (I deleted the curmudgeonly remarks about how appliances don't last like they used to.) Home Depot & Lowe's both had sales. We drove to Home Depot first. The back area of store was empty of employees. Irritated and unwilling to seek out help, we went to Lowe's. An easy decision when we remembered how the Salem Lowe's appliance employees have gone the extra mile for us in the past.

Despite both employees being busy, we received excellent customer service. They were out of the model we wanted, but called (& called & called) Albany to have one put on hold for us. "It's a gorgeous new store!" We made the drive down, happy to know we'd have a dryer in time to do some laundry on Sunday. It is a beautiful store. However, once we walked in, we soon realized that the employees weren't making eye contact at all. Most were walking to or from the break room or looking at their smart phones. We navigated our way back to the well marked appliance area, Not a customer or employee in sight.

I began to scan the aisles in the vicinity and saw an older woman putting things back on the shelves. I called out a greeting to her and she came over to help us out with the transaction. Even though she seemed unfamiliar with all of the required steps on the computer, she stuck with it and escorted us to the front where we completed the transaction at the cash register. The young clerk at the cash register may have spoken 2 words to us and pulled her phone out of her pocket when the transaction was over.

We waited and waited: Used the restroom, flipped through some magazines, checked our phones, chatted. I was hungry and getting impatient. We went over to the customer service area. There was a young clerk sitting in front of a computer looking at her smart phone. I called out a greeting to her to get her attention. She repeated to us that the dryer would indeed be brought up to the front of the store. We waited another 15 minutes before a young man appeared with the box on a cart.

The next morning, N began the process of installation. He went to attach the new cord we had been handed by the appliance employee--wrong cord. How can two stores be completely different in the level of customer service? New and beautiful doesn't count in my book.