What happened to Lowes customer service? A tale of a company in decline!

I stopped going to Home Depot many years ago because their customer services was so poor. I’ve been going to Lowes in recent years but I can no longer tolerate their indifference to creating a quality customer experience.

I recently went to my local Lowes in Temecula, California to purchase some custom paint. It was in the early morning and there were only a few customers in the paint section. There wasn’t an employee anywhere. Regardless I decided to pick my color and attempt to purchase some paint.

I found the base paint I wanted and needed someone to mix the paint for me. Unfortunately the SOLE person assigned to the paint department had just left for a one hour lunch at mid morning. They had two warehouse people and a gal from another department trying to help. The gal from the other department did her best to mix my 5 gallon paint but kept missing the hole where the tint goes and ruining to five gallon paint buckets. The two warehouse guys (now paint guys) did what they do best by moving paint cans around on the shelves. After more than 40 minutes I was able to get the ZONE manager to get the paint done correctly.

Then I went to the self checkout, after the SOLE person checking out customers loudly stated, “I have one customer ahead of you please use the self checkout for faster service.” I am pretty sure her only goal was to do less work not to get me out any faster. So….I proceeded to the self checkout. Once there, the machine wouldn’t recognize some of the bar codes and kept telling me to put things back in the checkout spot or take them out. After 15 minutes I decided I wanted to talk to the store manager. I was told the store manager was busy on register twelve. I decided at that time just to leave because if Lowe’s uses their store managers to checkout customers instead of addressing their customer’s concerns then there was no hope.

The point of my story is cost cutting to the point where you have unqualified people running departments, no one running check stands and managers who are unavailable because they have to run a register is a foolish way to cut costs and run a business. Goodbye Lowes! I’m off to my local family owned hardware store where they give a damn. Let me know your thoughts by responding to this blog post.