I went to Lowes tonight to pick up a few things. After pricing things at the garden center, then walking to the far end of the store to pick up some rebar, I headed back to the garden center. I got everything I needed there, well, almost everything.

I needed a few landscape timbers, but the ones there were moldy. They weren’t just growing mold spots, they were growing mold worse than a loaf of stale bread. I found two associates standing around talking and asked if they could bring down one of the packs of new landscape timbers that looked really nice and was promptly told no and there were more by the contractor desk… at the other end of the store. The one associate was even sitting on a forklift and could have gotten them down in about 2 minutes. As I walked away, I heard the one associate on the forklift  tell the other associate that they had to sell through them and they weren’t going to put any more out until they did. Frankly, they looked like last year’s stock and had been sitting out all winter.

The other associate walked back over to me and told me that before I walk to the other end of the store, that the ones in the new bundles were moldy too. I asked him to show me where, because all the ones I was looking at weren’t moldy. Besides, its treated lumber… it shouldn’t be growing mold.

Rather annoyed, I walked the cart to the front of the garden section and left it there as I walked across the front of the store to the contractor desk. There were no landscape timbers there. After walking back through lumber and finding another associate, he pointed me to what I was looking for… in the back corner of the store. The timbers there looked half decent, and weren’t growing anything. I walked back to my cart, completing my second lap around the store. At this point, after the way I was treated, I was in no mood to grab my cart and make a third lap since my car was parked in front of the garden center and I would have had to walk back there to check out anyway.

I guess I’ll be stopping at Home Depot some other day after work this week. This is not the typical service I receive at Lowes and was quite shocked at how the associate had no desire to even help a customer out. I was half tempted to leave my cart and just walk out of the store.