re: #187 BigPapa

It’s happening in my business too, although I’m in a service industry that makes $ on products that I sell.

Now you have big box stores selling electronics at thinner and thinner margins, sometimes staffed by ‘experts’ and sometimes not even that.

All it does is kill the real profession and remove the choice from the consumer.

Yep.
And the big box stores are not necessarily less expensive.

I wanted new countertops in my kitchen, so I checked Lowe’s offerings and made a selection, and went to the computer and put in the measurements I took, which I knew may or may not have been right; AND I wanted a 15” backsplash.

Well: Before they would send an expert out to take real measurements, they wanted me to put up 1/2 my estimated cost FIRST, AND they told me I could not have a 15” backsplash, it could be no more than 4”. WTF?

I got pissed off and called a local company that installs countertops. They came RIGHT out, did the measurements, gave me an estimate, talked to me about how they would handle the problem areas I had AND told me I could indeed have a 15” backsplash if that’s what I wanted. And it came to $2000 less than the Lowe’s estimate. That’s not an insubstantial difference.