The Lows and Highs of Lowe's

We've been working on our home renovation project for 4 years now.  It's Art's retirement project. Yes, it's true.  The house is still not finished.  However, there are things that need to be repaired.  This morning mom said the pendant lamp in her closet had burnt out.  When we tried to undo the bulb, we found that the bulb was rusted into the socket and we couldn't change it.  Hawaiian salt air again.

We went to Home Depot where they almost know our faces.  However they didn't have a lamp that we liked. 

We have found before that Lowe's has a better selection so we traveled a bit to get there and found one we liked.

The Lowe's check-out person was as friendly and sweet as could be and we left with a lovely holiday feeling.  When our contractor was working on our home, he said that he found Home Depot or Hardware Hawaii to be the friendliest, most helpful places.  The check-out person had us feeling that things were improving quite a bit there.

Then we brought the lamp home and Art found a 1/2" diameter glass chip embedded to the glass lamp shade.  Aggravation!  We had to go all the way back to return it.  Instead of just exchanging the glass lamp shade they said they had to change the whole unit and box.

The girl at customer service was civil, but without much cheer or apology in her demeanor.  She said you couldn't even keep the instruction sheet that Art had already written the serial number on even though the numbers on both boxes were the same.

Ah well... "Keep smiling," I told Art.  "Go with the flow.  That's how they do things here."

We brought home the box and Art once more commenced with installing the lamp in the closet.  A few minutes later, I heard a groan.

That thingamajig was jammed to the socket thing so the glass lampshade couldn't be attached.

"You call Lowes", said Art.  "I'm too irritated."

When I got through to customer service, the woman was civil.  When I asked her if we could just exchange the thingamajig, she said, "No, the box we brought in earlier was already collected at 2:30 PM and locked in a cage they couldn't access." 

I turned her over to Art who said he'd already installed the rest of the lamp and were they asking him to uninstall it.  Apparently, she must have detected more crankiness in his voice or something because she said we could just bring the thingamajig in.

We were NOT happy.  This would be our third trip to Lowe's and after having that lovely interaction with the first cashier, the other two ladies left a rather non-holiday feeling in our spirit.  I'd tried to be as upbeat as I could, but I was getting tired of this.

We went back to the Customer Service desk again.

I don't know what it was about Kepa.  He smiled.  He was accommodating and saw right away what was wrong.  He had Art bring another box from the aisle and replaced the damaged part.

I told Kepa that I was really going to write a not so positive post about Lowes, but he was turning it around.

Kepa said he'd had a few bad moments earlier too, but was trying to stay as upbeat as possible.

I told him he'd really made our day brighter and left us with a better feeling toward Lowe's.  Isn't it funny?  It can take just a couple of people to turn you off to a place and then just another couple to make you like it.

Back at home, the lamp is finally installed and mom can now see what she has in her closet again.

And yes, we'll go back to Lowe's... if nothing else to see if Kepa is still cheering the place up with his smiles.

And did I mention that the shave ice stand is a short walk away?

POSTSCRIPT:  Art said the thingamajig is a socket ring.