A bad vendor experience..

A bad vendor experience...  Our old trash compactor (one that we inherited with the house) was on its last legs: rusty bin, problems with the tracks, noisy as all get out.  I'd been looking into a replacement for over a year, and I waited for a highly-rated KitchenAid model (at right) to become available – and for some of the other projects I had going to settle down.  So in early October, I selected a vendor (Lowe's) and ordered it.  They promised delivery on October 24th.  I was surprised that it would take two weeks, but that was still ok.

Well, the 24th came and I hadn't heard from Lowe's at all.  Not good.  I called, was promised a call back with a delivery date.  Never heard back.  I called again, this time got another delivery date promised: the 30th.  The 30th came and went.  Are you seeing a pattern here?  In this day and age, when vendors like Lowe's must compete with Amazon, the experience was so bad I can still scarcely believe it.  Overall it was five weeks from the time I placed the order until it arrived in my house.  I called Lowe's on six separate occasions, was promised three different delivery dates before they finally got it right on the fourth try.  There is no online service to get this information, and every employee I contacted seemed to be uncertain about how to even find my order – much less any accurate information about it.  I never received any sort of email confirmation from Lowe's (no snail mail, either).  I still don't have a receipt, though the cost was charged to my credit card.  About the only positive thing I have to report about the experience with Lowe's was that their delivery people were great: they had the right equipment, they took great care in the delivery, and they were friendly and polite.

We will never be ordering online from Lowe's again, unless convincing evidence of improvement is presented to us.  You may remember that we had a similarly disappointing experience with WalMart a few months ago.  Based on these two experiences, I'd say Amazon has little to worry about.  The bad service from Lowe's and WalMart contrasts especially keenly with the almost perfect record of great service with have with Amazon...

I should be careful to point out here that we have zero complaints about the trash compactor itself.  It is exactly as advertised.  So far we are very pleased with it.  It opens and closes effortlessly, and its operating noise is roughly half that of our old compactor.  A win on that front!