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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Pro-tip for shopping at Home Depot: order whatever you need with in store pickup. You’ll generally get it same day and leave it to them to navigate the labyrinth to find that size Q widget. Most importantly, when the online stock status does not match the actual shelves, they pay the wasted time and report that back to you.

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In my experience with Home Depot order pickup:

a) when they don't actually have stock of something they just silently refund it and don't give it to you. When you're buying a bunch of small things like fixtures it can be easy not to notice that an important one is missing, which is even more infuriating when there's a clear and acceptable substitute to the missing SKU

b) You lose the opportunity to screen for clearly returned or damaged goods, which at least my local branch is rife with.

My alternative tip is to use the website (filtered to your store), where they tell you exactly what aisle and bay the product you're looking for is in.

YMMV. I’ve had nothing but trouble with both pickup and delivery from both Home Depot and Lowes, the last time I ordered from Lowe’s they told me “oh, you can’t believe the website when they say that we have it and it will be there tomorrow, you have to call in to make sure.” Home Depot took four hours to pick my order after I showed up because I got an email saying it was ready, I ended up having to follow them around to make sure they did it.

Good tip, unless you're buying lumber. You'll invariably end up with some amount of warped trash lumber if you let them pick it out for you.

Exactly, HD lumber is junk to begin with, often you need to go through half of the pile to find couple decent pieces. If you order online you’ll get junk filtered out by other customers.

Is this a thing? Home Depot and Lowes both list the aisle and bin number on the website, in my experience. I've often found myself wishing other stores were as easy to navigate.

The problem arises when the item isn’t actually on the listed shelf or it’s all the way at the top requiring an employee to bring it down. Or worse when the stock status does not jive with reality.

Maybe I’m an anomaly, but as somebody whose been doing a ton of pandemic DIY home projects, I’ve been at Home Depot and Lowes hundreds of times over the past 2 years, and I can’t think of a time where they said something was in stock and it wasn’t, or wasn’t where they said it would be. I’m 100% confident the site has never given me an aisle location for an item stored on the top shelf where they do bulk storage and need employee help.

I think sometime in 2020 this became just a "tip for anywhere that has a physical store."

Pro-Tip #2, their website will tell you aisle #1, location # for every item and usually if it's in stock

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