Skip to main content

Smelling Excuse

This story about Home Depot not doing all that hot and how it a bell-weather for consumer sentiment seems to missing some important data points. HD's quality of in-store service has been on a declining path for a long time. The inventory in the store is poor compared to the customer's online options. A vast majority of the items are not price competitive. We had a small home improvement project in mind for a while and showed up to our local HD one evening with a full shopping list. Between having to wait 8 weeks to get a key item needed for the project and much higher price compared to our online options for the items they did have, we had no way to pull the trigger on the project. 

Time kills all deals as we know. The ideal customer experience would have been for a knowledgeable customer rep to understand what we wanted to get done, provide us an all-inclusive HD pricing with a guaranteed delivery date for all items on our list, get us to commit on the project instead of leaving because we could not see a path to completion in the next couple of weekends. The issue here is that the customer wanted to experience some certainty and HD failed to rise to the occasion. 

Back in the day, the first rep we stopped to ask a question about an item on our list would take the opportunity to chat with us about our project and what we were hoping to accomplish and by when. They were able earn our trust because they had skill and experience. In that context an 8 week wait would have felt very different. All that is ancient HD history. All this prattle about consumers needing for the world to become a better place before they improve their kitchen seems like HD abdicating ownership of their many failures - the whining smells an awful lot like poor leadership looking for a way to cover up their mismanagement. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more