Wayne D's Blog

Perhaps hate is too strong a word.  What I dislike intensely is the wait in line. My local Home Depot replaced two or three checkout desks with four self service checkouts.  I would have used them except that the item I had was too big to fit on the scanner desk and the self service checkouts don't have hand scanners. Even if I would have had a smaller item the lines for the self service checkouts was as long as the lineups for the regular checkout.  I saw one guy who had a 10 foot high tree on a cart who had pulled it up to one of the self service checkouts and then couldn't figure out how to scan it.  This effectively blocked that checkout while the staff member who was monitoring the self serve checkouts came over to help him figure out what to do.  This was a Saturday afternoon and there were 4 staffed checkout desks including the lumber one which had a lineup that stretched half way down the lumber aisle. When I first saw the length of the lineups I actually took my item back and was going to leave the store before I left the store I realized that I really did need my item so I went back, retrieved it and joined the line.

As I waited in line I discussed with other people in the line how we disliked coming to Home Depot because they always have such a long wait to checkout. One of the women in my line had joined the line when she entered the store while her husband went to retrieve the item they were going to purchase just so they could avoid the long wait in the checkout line.  Home Depot, how about setting up a cash only, express line with a $1 surcharge?  I'd gladly pay for the convenience.

I used to avoid Home Depot and instead shop at the Home Hardware building store in town but it closed soon after Home Depot opened, I really miss it.  It had an old fashioned lumber yard, one time the two guys in the yard helped me to tie a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood to the top of my old mustang when it wouldn't fit in the hatchback. It's also the same place that we bought the three sheets of drywall from when we wanted to close up an archway in our house.  Home Depot has a fixed delivery charge of $50 which is a bit excessive for 1o bucks worth of drywall. Their other alternative was rent a van for 24.95 for 4 hours. The only problem with that was that you couldn't reserve the vans in advance and they were all taken. Home Hardware delivered the drywall for $15.

Next time it's the Home Hardware in Oak Ridges for me.  I wonder if Rona has any plans for a store in Richmond Hill?

 While I'm ranting, hey Yahoo, why doesn't Yahoo 360 have a spell checker built in? I'm getting tired of copying my entries to Microsoft Word so I can spell check them.  That’s one backwards step the Yahoo mail beta has taken. The spell checker doesn't work on Firefox, the spell checker in the previous version worked fine in Firefox.  In the Yahoo Mail beta when you click on the spell check button all you get is a pop up that says the spell check function is under development for Mozilla. Do you think I should believe them?