Home Depot Website Prices Have Nothing To Do With In Store Prices
Remember, Home Depot's price match policy doesn't apply to online listings, including its own website. At his local store, Michael paid more than twice the online Home Depot price for a coaxial cable, but Home Depot refused to refund him the difference. They even say as much in small print on each page of their website. With Home Depot, be sure to call and get a valid local price quote before heading off to purchase something you saw online.
I needed to buy a 50' coaxial cable to hook up a TV in my bedroom. After looking over Home Depot's website, I found what I needed at this link.
Since it was something I wanted to have tonight, I headed over to my local Home Depot store. I found the cable I was looking for right away, but the price was $17.35, more than $10 over the price I set out to pay.
Maybe foolishly, I decided to go ahead and buy it since I didn't have a printout of the website to prove in any way that the price was indeed $6.99. I figured I would call customer service once I got home and they would sort it out for me. Ha! Wrong.
I called their customer service number and got Tracy. Tracy was nice, but said they do not price match between the store and the website. I asked for a supervisor. I got Michael. He also asserted that the store and the website are separate things, and they do not price match. It didn't matter how much I explained that I would have never gone to Home Depot in the first place were it not for the price on their website. The only answer I got was "we have to stand by our price match policy."
I let them know that their policy had lost them a customer, and that I would be telling everyone I know about the negative experience I had. No dice. They're going to stand behind their policy.
I know this isn't the biggest travesty ever sent to the Consumerist, but I hope you can get the message out there that the price on Home Depot's website does not in any way reflect the price you'll see in the store.
Near the footer on each page of their website Home Depot displays the following:
† Local store prices may vary from those displayed. Products shown as available are normally stocked but inventory levels cannot be guaranteed.
This fine print is in a light grey color and easy to miss, though—a small detail, but it matters when you're trying to comparison shop. We were also surprised by the amount of the price difference for the same in-store product, which is why we decided to go ahead and post this. A 10-30% difference might be expected, but the in-store product is almost two and a half times more expensive!
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
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I bought a house in January and I had to buy appliances: washer, dryer and refrigerator. I did my research online and found the lowest prices for the items I wanted on Home Depot's website. I went into my local store with print outs of what I found on the net and the salesperson got on his computer at the store and matched the prices I had seen online, no problema.
Buy AV cables at Target. Their store brand ones are just fine and about 1/4 to 1/10th of the price. The cable we needed to hook up our new TV was $4.99.
The easy solution for this is to do what I do when I absolutely positively need something right now and have no choice but to overpay and/or shop somewhere like Best Buy that I hate:
Go to the store, buy the item you want, make sure you save the receipt. Get home and order the item from the website (or even better - any other place you can find it cheaper, you'll have time to shop around now), and wait for it to arrive. Just make sure it is the same EXACT item / UPC / model #.
When it arrives, take the new, unopened item back to the store with your original receipt and get a refund. No hassles because the item was unopened, and you got the item when you needed it, and also at the best price you could find it for anywhere.
:-)
Doesn't anyone understand that the reason the online prices are lower are 1) it doesn't include shipping and 2) the stores incur even higher cost associate with getting the product shipped to the store, received, and stocked. Take some business classes or better yet stop and think.
So why can't he return it?
@octajohnny: Yeah, I did that with a hard drive once. I seriously needed a drive *right then* due to mine dying, Newegg was super cheap like always, but it'd have to be shipped, and it was the weekend, of course. I didn't want to have to pay $50 more for it locally, so I did the switch-a-roo. In the end, it worked like a charm (except, now CC is going bankrupt, so that might be my fault :) ).
@f3rg: I don't think I'd do it from different stores. Don't they track the serial numbers?
I admit I did this when I was a kid. I bought a Commodore 1581 3.5" floppy drive on-line from a private seller. It had a click of death. I bought a new one from Toys R Us, and returned the bad one. I feel bad about it now that I'm a responsible adult.
Many stores have different (lower) prices online to encourage more people to buy. The reason they are lower is to make up for shipping costs. If the cable online was $8, they probably would have charged him another 8 bucks to ship to his house.
@strathmeyer:
That's actually what I did. I decided I could wait for the cable and that I was not going to pay more than twice the price I left the house to pay.
The guy who accepted my return sympathized completely - and even told me he would have adjusted the price but the store manager recently told the staff they could no longer do that.
@agb2000: That's not breaking the rules, that's negotiating on big-ticket items. The guy probably would've come down even if she hadn't come with the printouts, and he wouldn't have given her a refund of the difference if she hadn't haggled and then came back with the printouts after making the purchase.
@jwalker095: Yep, the dreaded shipping costs...when you just want one item, and it costs almost as much as the item itself to ship it to you. This is why if I'm comparison shopping, I find shipping rates first.
I believe you've just explained the price difference in terms the value each service provides. The Home Depot online store offers lower prices, but you do not get the product instantly (you have to wait for it to ship). Additionally, they don't need to stock the inventory at a specific location (which incurs higher costs than stocking at a distribution center or warehouse), which allows for the lower price. Your local Home Depot, on the other hand, provides you the ability to see and touch a product before making a purchase, as well as instant receipt of your goods. The local store offers a more valuable service, so they are right in charging more for it. Another way to look at it is if you are willing to wait longer to receive your product, you can pay less for it. This makes perfect sense in terms of the value each service provides. Personally, I appreciate having the choice between the two, and I applaud Home Depot for giving us the choice rather than charging in-store prices online. The fact that both are "Home Depot" services doesn't make them the same - they are obviously quite different for the reasons you point out.
Anything cable related needs to come from www.monoprice.com you have to be an idiot to shop anywhere else.
@bohemian:
Target is just as sleazy with the online/B&M price-switch game. I wrote off Target a long time ago over that crap.
people that fail to plan in projects that require 50 feet of cable would fall into the same group of people.
That's funny, this happened to me just last week. I checked online for some 16 gauge speaker wire, and they were $12.97 for 100 feet (had Gears of War 2 and didn't feel like waiting for monoprice). I didn't realize that the store price would be higher. When I got there, it was 23 dollars and change. I was shocked, but I managed to get them to price match. Even the clerks thought 23 bucks was excessive.
Best to bring the page in, find a manager and tell him "your not getting the sale unless you give me this price." If not can you give me directions to Lowe's?
It is a lot easier for them to adjust a price before a sale than after. One is a $6.99 sale, one time. the other is a 17.35 and -10.36 leaving you with a customer average of 3.50.
Now all of us consumerists are wandering, but hey Dan, what has all that got to do with me. I feel like if you help the stores out sales wise, they can provide better service to you.
Technically if they are standing by company policy, (using the cooperation as a crutch)they don't see themselves as doing anything wrong, and that is the bad part about it, they think they are doing the right thing by not giving you some money back.
Walmart does the same thing
I am a Returns and Customer Service employee for Home depot. I know for a fact that we are suppose to mark the price down to the website price. We have internet access to the website for that reason. But HD is the 2nd largest corp on the planet so there is bound to be a few bad stores. And just make sure you aren't lazy like this guy and ASK BEFORE you buy it. I can pretty much guarantee they will adjust the price. Company policy just recently changed and is really trying to focus on customer service.
this EXACT thing happened to me at home depot: coaxial cable needed for election night, saw it online for $14.99, was in store for $27.99. if i had bought it online it would have been cheaper including the shipping!
the people at the store were useless, customer care was useless. the executive email carpet bomb, however, brought me a call from a far fancier ind of customer care and my $$ was replaced.
@IHaveAFreezeRay: I have been on FAR, FAR too many sites where you have to go all the way as far as payment confirmation just to find out how much the shipping is.
I HATE that.
As Jedipunk said, Walmart has the same policy. Reason being: When they price match, they price match against their competitors in order to get your business. Their own website is not a competitor, and they don't care if you buy it from their website instead of their store because they're STILL getting your business.
Remember, price matching is to get you to buy it from them.
@balthisar: Well, I was mainly talking about small things... like the cable mentioned in the original story... so when you return something back to the store, you're giving them back exactly what you bought from them - a new, unopened cable - so it's more or less "borrowing" something for a week and giving it back in the exact condition you got it. :-)
For pricier items, you'd have to be careful - you'll see on the receipt if they scan the serial # because it will be printed on the receipt - like for ipods, gps', gaming consoles, etc so it won't work that way.
Of course, if the receipt doesn't have the serial # printed on it, then they usually check that items serial # matches the serial # printed on the box, so you can't just slip your old broken junk into the new item's box. But if you have your original box in like new condition, or returning another brand new sealed item, then that's a different story... for those of you who do things like that. :-)
next time go to lowes. They'l usually bend over backwards for a customer
I have to say that Best Buy did a nice price match last week or two weeks ago. I was able to get 3 years of "The Batman" for $8.99 each. Target site said this price. Why they sets 1-4 was on sale at $10 each, set 5 was $20 so I saved.
Lowes and HD are next to each other where I live. I never been to the HD.
People need to get over the variance between online and in-store prices. Online prices are invariably lower than in-store because of the significantly lower labor costs involved in a shipping facility versus a physical store. I groan every time I hear people griping about this. Unless it expressly says that the price posted online will be the price in-store, don't take that to be the case!! This is common knowledge that online is usually cheaper.
I've only had this happen when going to one of the stores that Home Depot acquired, like Yard Birds in the SF Bay Area. Typically, especially if you enter your zip-code on the website, the prices are equal in store.
Did you confirm the SKU was the same? Is it a normal Home Depot?
Like you said - I'd be okay with 10% variance, but this difference is so drastic its hard to believe there isn't more to it.
Make sure that the one you bought is quad-shielded or not, and the same with the one on the website. That can usually contribute to a significant price difference with coax.
I was just wondering what shipping was: Merchandise Subtotal $6.99 Estimated Standard Shipping* $6.50 Sales tax determined during later steps Estimated Total $13.49
Even if they matched prices, they would have matched $13.50..So for $3.50 you got your cable that day instead of waiting a week - not too bad of a deal...
or maybe its god's way of saying "hey, you dont really wanna watch tv in the bedroom, do ya?"
In store prices are always more expensive for the reason the post stated: People who want to buy the cables want to watch TV, generally immediately.
There is nothing more satisfying than setting everything up, and taking in how much better it was than before.
This prevents people from ordering online, or even comparison shopping much between stores.
I really like boricuachick idea, really neat.
Had this happen last week. They said, prices may differ online, and I just said, please match your own web site, and she did it. I did have the print out with me.
A few weeks back my wife and I wanted to purchase a game for the Nintendo DS (Lego Star Wars, The Complete Sage) as a gift for our nephew. Most store prices we checked were around $35-40. Then one day Target listed it on their website for $20, available "only in stores", not online. We went to the nearest Target, where the posted price was $35. We pointed out the price on the website, including the offer only being available in stores language, but the staff just kept repeating "we don't match prices".
It took 45 minutes of talking to the staff, and the staff trying to contact someone at corporate on the phone, before the manager finally overrode the store price and sold us the game for $20. Apparently it was set to go on sale the next day, but the website had jumped the gun.
I'd have to call the guy a sucker. Oh look good price , at the store.. oh not such a good price. Oh well , i'll not even mention it to them at the cash or anything. Personally think this guy put himself into this position , rather then do anything about it when he had the chance.
I have basically the same story that happened to me recently.
I was purchasing a garage door opener and the model I wanted just happened to be $30 more in the store, while every other model they carried matched the website prices. When I spoke with the manager, he was extremely rude (even cussing at me), it was like I was asking him money launder or something.
It ended with me promising never go back and abandoning my shopping cart full of product at the desk -- which he yelled at me for doing so. He told me I was required to return it to the shelves!
This happened 6 months ago and Home Depot is 2 miles from my home (Lowes is much farther). Since this occured, HD lost out on my Hard Wood floors, 2 bathroom remodels, new front door and rear doors and appliances.
Is it any wonder Home Depot has been performing so badly lately?
I'm tired of Home Depot and their filthy stores. Everything is always covered in dust. The only reason I would buy anything at Home Depot is if Lowes didn't have it and I needed it right away.
You're not looking at it the right way. The price at the B&M store wasn't more than twice as much.
The price online was less than half the store price!
Home Depot is looking out for you!
Barnes & Noble does the same thing. Even the manager told me that that is going to ruin them. I wanted to buy a book that was $25 in store, but $20 on their own website. It was $16 on Amazon. I would have paid the $20 since I could pick it up at the store, but they refused. They did offer to order it for me online for $20 and ship it to me, which I said why would I give you the business when I can just order it from Amazon for even less than your own site? They lost two sales that day, idiots.
My local GameStop has the same policy. When I asked them to look up the price online they told me they didn't have internet access. So I went home printed the page out and returned for them to tell me they don't price match their online store. Even after speaking to a manager I got the same response. I haven't seen this on any in store sign or on their website. I must be overlooking something...
@ajlei:
Especially so with low priced items where a single cost factor (such as shipping) can have dramatic effects on the price.
Further more, websites allow a business to showcase a different product mix (or in most cases MORE products) on the web versus showroom.
First of all, the price difference has a reason. It's much easier to maintain a warehouse of inventory that doesn't need to be displayed, priced, or have retail associates paid to move the merchandise around.
That's the simple reason why online stores have cheaper prices than B&M. It's the same reason why B&M stores refuse to price match places like Newegg.com. They simply can't afford to sell items on such slim margins.
Now to the op in this story, he should have printed his website price and brought it with him, although the store's policy of not refunding the difference is much more offensive.
To note, the Ace Hardware I worked at had a similar situation: often prices online were lower. However, we were able to look up the current online price and would happily price match any item if a customer simply asked us to do so, even without proof. The number of people who requested was so low that it probably didn't affect our bottom line much, and we gained a loyal customer.
Just today I bought a leaf blower from Lowe's using their "pick up in store" option. Their website promised that I would receive the lower of the online price or the in-store price. Still got my leaf blower same day, with the online price.