Tuesday, August 22, 2006

I Dare You Not To Listen

I double dog dare you to see this and not listen to a sample or two. At least own up to the one you did. For me it was Alligator ass.

EDIT: Ah, you all missed out. Apparently the site that I linked to has been torn down in favor of a new one, but on this one you can't listen to the songs. It's really too bad.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Home Depot in Emeryville Sucks

I wanted to let Sous' post sit on top for a bit before I did this, but the Home Depot in Emeryville on Emry Ave. sucks. It may be the worst hardware store on Earth. Now this isn't just, "I went in for some screws and a sander and someone was rude." No, sir. I've worked retail for far too many years and understand that sometimes it's just a bad time. But for a week and a half I went to the Home Depot in Emeryville at least once if not twice a day. Every journey was a symphony of frustration.

First, finding someone to help you is like playing wack-a-mole. Except when you actually wack that mole it doesn't tell you that it's not his or her department and then shine you on about how he'll call someone to help you. Only two out of five times (I had to go there enough for this to be a reduced ratio-and I actually kept track) would they actually make any announcement and absolutely zero times would that help come. Place on top of this the complete and total disengagement of the employees. Though to be fair, there was one doddering old man who seemed to care but was too far off the rails to really be able to help-but by depth of comparison he was a fountain of information.

The shelves are a complete shambles, marked poorly and inaccurately, and they are completely understocked. If you have a project larger than fixing a cabinet door, forget it. For a store of its size it has shockingly little. By the end of my job despite the additional distance I would go to OSH on Ashby in Berkeley first, just to avoid frustration.

Do not go to the Home Depot in Emeryville. It is nearly the worst retail place on Earth. And I used to work at a record store.

Why am I bothering, since only one reader I know about is in the Bay Area? Because thanks to sitemeter I know that we can be a bit of a Google trap, and hopefully I can warn off an innocent Googler looking for a hardware store in Emeryville and save him the hard ship of going to the worst one ever-the horrible Home Depot in Emeryville.