Then, it turned out that they’d only given me 20 square yards of carpet, not the 26.6 square yards I paid for.

Apparently, somebody there has at least a bit of a clue about how to do decent customer service, because they called my house today.  My wife gave them my email address, and they just sent me this in email:

I received your letter today in the mail and I would like to apologize for your experience. I will refund you for the entire roll of carpet. I will work with our associates and review “how to measure carpet accurately” with each associate. I hope this makes up for your time and poor experience. If you need anything else please feel free to contact me. Again I would like to apologize.

Good turnaround time and acceptable resolution (more than I asked for).  As far as I’m concerned, the issue is resolved to my satisfaction.  Although I do still wish they’d gotten it right to begin with.

Speaking of which, while writing this blog entry, a light-bulb came on over my head, and I think I figured out how I ended up with a 15-foot length of carpet instead of a 20-foot length.  I suspect that the machine they use to measure and roll carpet is calibrated to measure square yards, not length.  Either the associate who measured my carpet didn’t know that, or he knew it but heard “20 square yards” when what I had said (repeatedly) was “20 feet long.”

October 2, 2009

Store Manager
The Home Depot
615 Arsenel Street
Watertown, MA 02471

To whom it may concern:

This letter concerns a purchase whose receipt bar code is labeled “[elided]”.

Last Sunday, I visited your store to purchase a large piece of outdoor carpet. I told the sales associate who was assisting me that I wanted to buy a twenty-foot length from a standard twelve-foot roll.

After that associate and another one rolled and wrapped the carpet, one of them took out a calculator, tapped on it for a moment, announced that I was purchasing 1.44 square yards of carpet, and then went to get me a cart. The other associate dutifully wrote this on the roll.

There are some people who would have let this pass, but I am not one of them. I took out my own calculator, worked through the correct calculations, and informed the associate that the correct figure was 26.6 square yards. He thought about this for a moment and then crossed out the incorrect amount and wrote mine down in its place. I don’t know if he was actually convinced I was right, or merely saw nothing wrong with overcharging a customer who volunteered for it. In any case, I paid for the carpet and a spool of rope, used the rope to tie the carpet to the roof of my van, and then took it home.

Yesterday, when I unrolled the carpet to put it down in my back yard, I discovered that it was only fifteen feet long, not twenty feet, as I’d told the associate several times and he’d repeated back to me. Although this made the carpet unsuitable for its intended purpose, I cut and installed it anyway. I was on a tight schedule and did not have hours to roll it back up, load it back onto my van, return to the store, find a manager to talk to about the problem, unload the bad carpet from my van, get new carpet cut, load the new carpet onto my van, and return home.

At around 2:30pm today, I called your store to speak to a manager about what had happened. The associate who answered the phone put me on hold for a while and then returned and said, “I’m sorry, all the managers must be in a meeting right now or something, because none of them are answering their pagers.” It’s outrageous for a customer who calls a huge store like The Home Depot in the middle of a weekday and says that he has a problem and needs to speak to be a manager to be told, “Sorry, you’re out of luck.”

Here is what you are going to do to remedy this situation:

1. You are going to refund to my credit card the $39.00 I was overcharged for 60 square feet (5 feet x 12 feet) of carpet I paid for that was supposed to be on the roll but wasn’t.
2. You are going to refund to my credit card a 10% discount on the rest of the carpet, $11.70, to compensate me for the fact that the piece of carpet you sold me was actually unsuitable for how I intended to use it, but I had to use it anyway to avoid the hassle and delay of returning it.

I hope that you will find a way to improve your training for associates so they can accurately measure carpet and calculate how much is being bought. Aside from that, I hope you will adjust your procedures so that when a customer calls with a complaint asks to speak to a manager, he actually gets to speak to one.

I look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: Frank Blake, CEO
The Home Depot, Inc.
2455 Paces Ferry Road
Atlanta, GA 30339

“How much carpet did you say I was buying?” I asked with bemusement.

“1.44 yards,” he responded.

“Hmm.  That doesn’t sound quite right.  Let me see what I get.”  I took out my BlackBerry, launched the calculator application, and talked “to myself” while clicking away.  “Let’s see… 12 feet times 20 feet is 240 square feet.  I think dividing by 9 will give me square yards.  That gives 26.6.”  Then I turned to the associate.  “26.6 square yards sounds a bit more reasonable than 1.44 for a piece of carpet that big, don’t you think?”

He looked as if he was thinking about it for a minute, asked me to repeat the number I came up with, crossed off the “1.44 sqyds” on the roll, and replaced it with “26.6 sqyds”.

It’s sort of sad that Home Depot hasn’t figured out how to either adequately train its staff in to handle the simple math problems they encounter every day, or how to post a chart next to the carpet rolls (which should be easy, since all they’re all 12′ wide).  It’s somewhat sadder that an adult who presumably graduated from high school is incapable of solving this trivial math problem.  But what’s saddest at all is that the two adults helping me were both so mathematically illiterate that neither of them recognized the patent absurdity in saying that a huge roll of carpet had an area of a couple square yards.