Shopping for Home Improvement Supplies
Hello - We are graduate students working on a school project and would be very grateful for the input of some Do-It-Yourself experts. Could you please take a couple of minutes to answer the following questions? Any information that you can provide would be much appreciated. Thank you very much. - Stacey, Alex and Amy (Boston University) 1. When buying home improvement supplies, what kind of in-store experience are you looking for? What kind of on-line experience? 2. Under what circumstances do you/would you use store websites to research home improvement product features and prices before buying?
When I buy home improvement supplies, I am looking for two things: a. That the store be in stock of the products they sell b. That the store have a reasonably wide selection of the products in a particular category. Let me amplify the second one. Home improvement stores come in various sizes, and a medium-sized one has about 40,000 different products, or "SKUs," on its shelves at any one time. That sounds like a lot, but at least 25 percent of all of those SKUs are in the same department--lawn and garden. (Lawn and Garden has so many SKUs they divide it into two completely separate departments--the "inside garden" department that has lawn mowers and weed killers, and the "outside garden" department that has plants and landscape pavers.) Spread out the other 30,000 SKUs between the other eleven sales departments in the store--lumber, building materials, flooring, paint, hardware, plumbing, electrical, kitchen & bath, appliances, millwork and decor. It's not an even spread--there are more SKUs on one side of the pipe fitting aisle in plumbing than there are in the entire appliance department; more SKUs in the light bulb aisle in electrical than there are in the lumber and millwork departments combined. Let's pick a department...oh, let's say appliances. If I want a new refrigerator, I expect there to be a nice selection of different models--ones with ice makers, ones with the freezer on the bottom, a really big one for a family that does lots of entertaining and a really inexpensive one that I can put in a rental property and not get too worked up when the renter rips the door off. I don't expect the entire Sub-Zero line to be sitting on the floor ready to drive home with. Obviously, "reasonably wide selection" means different things in different departments--if Joe Jones Paint Company offers 7500 colors in its catalog, I want to be able to get any of them. I want to be able to get any size bolt I need--obviously a home improvement store will not have bolts two inches in diameter. But I don't expect them to keep six different grades of untreated eight-foot 2x4s. I really don't use store websites to research features of products I'm considering purchasing. I use the manufacturer websites for this. Incidentally, you may not want to put my answer in your paper--I'm second in command of the lumber and building materials departments at a Home Depot in North Carolina. -- --jmowreader