Not a Fan of Lowes

Ok, Lowes has been irritating me lately. There used to be 3 different "home centers" in multiple locations around rochester: Home Depot, Chase Pitkin and Lowes. Two years ago all the Chase Pitkins closed, which really annoyed me as I lived about 2 miles away from one. Now that we live in Fairport, we're equal distance away from all of them. We were looking to buy a ceiling fan for the bedroom, so we ended up in Lowes looking at the fans. We found one on sale (and we had an additional coupon), but there weren't any on the shelf. Nobody was around, so I hit the "press me for assistance" button and waited 15 minutes for some guy to show up. We tell him what we want and he proceeds to spend like another 15 minutes looking around for the fan. Then he checks the computer which says they have 2 of them in stock. He then states that the system could be out of date, as it gets updated once a day. That just seems ridiculous for a big company inventory database to get updated once a day. I can't believe it isn't updated with every register transaction. Anyway, he says they must be out of them, but they get a shipment in a couple of days. He asks if we want to reserve one from the new shipment. We say yes and he puts our info in the computer. We walk up to the cashier, give her our phone number to pull the order up and then pay for it (in cash).

A few weeks before this we ordered some custom mirrors for our bathrooms and did the same thing where you pay ahead of time and they call you when they arrive. So we expected Lowes to call us when the item we reserved and paid for arrived. They didn't. So we go to pick it up when they said the new shipment would show up, starting at the service desk. We give them our phone number and nothing shows up. At least we find a couple of the fans we need on the shelf, but they never reserved one like they said, they just sold us a fan and never bothered making sure we got it. The problem was I didn't bother bringing the receipt, since the last time we just gave them our phone number and they handed us the mirrors, we didn't need a receipt. And if you remember I mentioned earlier that I paid in cash. So I hit the "press me for assistance" button again in the fan department and wait for 15 minutes again for some guy to show up. He looks in the computer and also doesn't find anything, no record of us "reserving" a fan and no record of us paying for one either. Finally we end up back at the service desk with some other chick and she pulls up the record no problem. I ask her again just to make sure I heard her right, and she was able to pull up our proof of payment in about 4 seconds. I don't know what was wrong with everyone else, but that took like forever when it should have taken 5 seconds.

The fan install was pretty easy, but putting in the box and the electric was sort of a pain as it required attic access and I don't really fit though the access hole to the attic.