Being a homeowner I have been to the Home Depot, Lowe's, Menard's, etc numorous times and more often then not the experience is pleasant. However this past weekend I was outraged by the lack of help from a couple of Home Depot Associates.

My sister moved into her new house last week and ordered a stove, refrigerator and dishwasher from Home Depot in Franklin to be delivered on Saturday. The appliances came in and the delivery guys installed the stove and refrigerator as expected. The Dish washer was going to be installed by my dad on Sunday. Well, that installation did not happen. Upon pulling the appliance out of the box we found the dishwasher to be missing a wheel, the door broken and a hose cut. Not what you would expect from a brand new appliance. Easy enough to fix just load the appliance into the SUV and return it for a new one -- WRONG!

As my sister's new home is closer to the Home Depot on 124th and North we decided to go there for the exchange. After an explaination about the condition of the appilance and the fact that this is all charged on the Home Depot card we were told that they could not help us as the appilance was purchased at the Franklin store. What? This is Home Depot, right? Why would a huge chain not be able to have transactions interchanged from store to store?

Needless to say this answer was not okay with us - so we began the discussion of why the exchange could not take place. The associate and his manager went on and on about how they would have to get the appilance from their store to the other one and that would be difficult. Then the fact that the transactions could not be looked up from store to store. Oh, and did I mention that the Franklin store did not have the appilance in stock so even if we went there we couldn't return with an appilance to install. They even suggested that we buy the new dishwasher there and then drive to the Franklin store to return the other one! What kind of crap is that - where is our deliver fee? During all of this not once did they call the other store and try to remedy it without inconveniencing us.

In the end they sold us the new appilance and had us return home with the old broken one which will be picked up sometime this week (as usual with a 4 hour delivery time slot). However they also left the lasting impression on us that Home Depot will not work with the customer to fix a problem in their store without a ton of hassle.