Dear Menards…

Dear Menards,

I’m breaking up with you. I’m tired of the low quality products you sell. Seems like anything I buy from you is some degree of chitty (do I need to remind you of the “industrial” shelving fiasco). Because of you, I’m going to get to replace all the screws holding my deck boards down. One out of every ten has broken since i built it last year. I’m tired of making multiple trips to your lumber yard because you can’t figure out how many 2×4’s to stock until the next shipment. I’m tired of buying nuts in prepackaged multiples of 13…that is if you even have them at all. One final piece of advice-focus on keeping your shelves well stocked with things that people usually go to a hardware store for, and let Walmart sell the deodorant and shampoo.

I’m done with you.

somebody bought “tool shop” brand or w/e it’s called?

You could always go to Lowes.

Had a customer last week the designed his mechanical room with space for a tankless water heater from lowes. He did this because of the big savings on running a tankless water heater and after the supposed rebates it was almost free. Guess on all the advertisement at Lowes it did not mention all the additional parts needed to hook up or the fact that lowes does not stock those parts.

Personally I thought Menards was a little better than Lowes. Both Menards and Lowes make home depot shine. Well that is if your looking for a shinny pile of .

And if you think the retail side is tough , you should “get” to do work for them . That’s a real treat

Most non-structural grades of screws, bolts, nuts, and other fasteners you find in any store in the U.S. – all come from China. None of them have any structural testing to back up any strength requirements or conditions. They generally use very poor quality grades of recycled steel to make the stuff too.

Yesterday Menards ad had Ribs on sale!!!!!

When I did my basement remodel in 2010 menards really helped me out

The customer service at the Hudson store was very helpful.

Home depot not so much

I feel customer service and competent employees are far and few nowadays. Seems half your rant is stuff that could be avoided with good inventory management and common sense. I don’t know to blame the company for hiring them or the employees themselves?

all home depot has on the other 2 is the rental dept. menards customer service is so much better than either of the other 2. i can ask anyone on the floor where something is and they know. i get blank stares from lowes.

i don’t mind the menards expansion. i miss the layout of the old one (when i was a kid i loved having to go to the 2nd level. but everything makes more sense where its at now. i can also get famous dave pickles where before i had to wait until our every other month visit to costco.

The right employee makes all the difference. Between 2004-2008 I purchased 100’s of thousands of dollars of materials from Home Depot and not Menards because of one GREAT person at Home Depot and of course the MAJOR hassle every time you bring back something back to Menards with crappie customer service.

Dear _____, …

Funny stuff.

The problem I’ve noticed is that between Menards, Lowes, and Home Despot, they seem to be in a 3-way competition to see how bad they can be and still get away with it.

After a series of incidents like the OP mentions, I quit using Menards for about 3 years. But then I got so fed up with Home Depot never having any employees that knew anything about anything and the high prices, that I went back to Menards out of desperation.

The pitfalls with Menards are still many:

– Never knowing what they’ve got in stock in the yard. Yeah, the computer says XX in stock, but that has no correlation to reality.

My all time favorite was when their stock computer said they had “plenty” of 1.5 inch PVC. Went out in the yard and there were 3 busted up pieces. Really? The most common plubing item on Earth and Menards runs out and doesn’t know they ran out.

– Having stuff that’s busted or beat to hell still on the shelf. Plywood where the whole bundle has had the corners crushed, sub-standard ply and boards that don’t make the grade they’re proported to be, doors and trim that are all scratched and bent, etc, etc, etc. If I had $1 for every stack of lumber I’ve had to sort thorugh at Menards just to get 5 boards that weren’t physically damaged, I’d be rich.

I got so frsustrated with trying to find downspouts that weren’t all scratched and bent to hell one time I finally hit the Way Pissed Off zone and got the General Manager. I said, “Why the hell do your people accept and put on the shelf this crap that’s all beat to hell?” He just said that they had to take whatever corporte sent them and shrugged it off. All the damaged stuff just gets put back on the shelves in hopes someone won’t notice or won’t care.

– Having to schlepp my own returns back to the yard. My personal favorite was when I recieved my second damaged custom-order shower base in a row and the girl behind the returns counter asked if I could drive it back to the special orders pickup area. Luckily, the MOD was right behind the counter and saw the steam shooting out of my ears and said that wouldn’t be necessary…

Good luck. I wish we had better choices in the East Metro. I use Lamperts whenever I can, but for most stuff there isn’t any other option.

Grouse

The straw that broke the back for me was when a Menards delivery truck showed up with a delivery and the garage doors…. plural 2 to be exact ….. showed up with out boxes at all. All the pieces were rolling around the back of this truck and the driver expected me to take delivery

I went to the store manager the next day and asked him how garage doors can go out for delivery in that kind of condition and he had no excuse. Last time I ever order from them.

Like I said for me it was the one Great employee that won me over to Home Depot. HD out of Brainerd by the way.

Lowes and Home Depot are basicaly layed out the same. Menards requires me to shop for an extra 20 minutes; simply looking around the store for needed items that you would think would be in obvious departments. Each time has always been predicatable that this will occur. Last time, shelving on one side of the store, brackets on the other side of the store. I can’t stand shopping there and avoid at all costs…..

One could always support their local hardware store / lumber yard if you still have one. People complain that the little guys are too expensive, and then complain that the big stores with lower prices have cheap junk. It’s a no win situation.

I don’t have a particular story but I tend to avoid them as well.

I chop down and mill my own trees and forge my own screws. Cuts out the middle man.

In retail there is an old saying, Price – Quality – Service

You can Pick two…….

With most big box stores, you’re purely buying on price.

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I chop down and mill my own trees and forge my own screws. Cuts out the middle man.

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We need to do this with agents too.

(Hoffies put me up to this)

Agents?

I use our local Ace for almost everything now days. Short of lumber. I pay a little more but I get a friendly greeting, knowledgeable answers no matter who I ask and a Thank You as I leave.

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I use our local Ace for almost everything now days. Short of lumber. I pay a little more but I get a friendly greeting, knowledgeable answers no matter who I ask and a Thank You as I leave.

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Me too!!

When is the last time anybody got a straight, dry piece of wood from a box store?

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When is the last time anybody got a straight, dry piece of wood from a box store?

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Got some cedar shims the other week from HD that were nice and straight

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When is the last time anybody got a straight, dry piece of wood from a box store?

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I have a couple dozen one liners just begging to be typed, but unfortunately, none are appropriate for a family site.

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When is the last time anybody got a straight, dry piece of wood from a box store?

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Last time we went there the wood was so heavy I asked the nearest Menard’s employee if this was cut from those trees that they harvest at the bottom of lakes.

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When is the last time anybody got a straight, dry piece of wood from a box store?

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I have a couple dozen one liners just begging to be typed, but unfortunately, none are appropriate for a family site.

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My thoughts exactly. It’s tough to make sodomy jokes and keep it pg-13.

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When is the last time anybody got a straight, dry piece of wood from a box store?

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What??? You mean anyone has EVER gotten a straight, dry piece of wood from a big box store??? I’m calling BS!!! Urban legend.

My personal favorite was my mother in law wanted to replace all her bifold closet doors in the place she bought. So we go to Menards and she picks out 8 nice solid core bifold doors.

We get them back to the house, I pull one of them out and it’s bowed like a bannana! I laid it on a flat floor and the middle of the door was 1.5 inches off the floor! Not only can they not get straight lumber, they can’t even get particle board that’s straight. So we look at the other doors and 7 out of the 8 were bowed so badly as to be unusable.

So we go back to Menards and take them back and at customer service they tell me they can exchange the defective doors. I said great! Have your guys start unpacking doors and only come up here when you’ve got 8 straight ones.

Ummmm, we can’t do that. You’ll have to go and pick them out yourself…

So I returned them and went to Lowes.

Grouse

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My thoughts exactly. It’s tough to make sodomy jokes and keep it pg-13.

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Whoah, who said anything about…oh, your from Wisconsin.