So the area where I bought my lovely little Victorian is in North Oakland right by the Emeryville and Berkeley border. There is a Home Depot approximately 3 minutes away on San Pablo Ave in Emeryville, but I've always been very hesistant to go there. I've had several bad experiences; the staff were completely unfriendly, the management non-existing/useless, and products placed in weird and non-intuitive arrangements. It was not on my hot list and I typically prefer to go to places where I can actually talk to staff and get their feedback since I typically don't know what I am doing most of the time anywhoo. (Evidence of this store's previous poor customer service can be shown here.)
I went to that Home Depot for a quick and dirty a couple of days ago and I swear it was a completely different store. My brother had me run in for a couple couplings for the plumbing job he was doing. In the whole 7 minutes I was there I was asked by 5 different people if I needed help. The lighting seemed brighter. People seemed happy and there were tons of great new deals. In fact, when I was looking at some beige tile for the kitchen, a customer service rep came up to me to ask if I'd be interested in their clearance tile which was selling for 1/10th of the original price. I got $2.90/sq ft tile for $0.29 /sq ft and it's gorgeous.
It was like some sort of weird twilight zone and so I had to ask someone what the heck was going on. Turns out that this particular Home Depot is under new management and they got rid of the old one. I also heard from employees how the old management really created a bad environment by trying to squeeze everyone/thing too hard and how they ended up losing customers because of it. And now thanks to this great experience, I'm going to keep coming back. Thank you new management for my fantastic (and cheap) new tile!
Hey North Oakland/Emeryville folks, check out the new and improved Home Depot!
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