The more they screw up...

...the bigger discount we get.

We have good intentions, really. We were willing to pay full price for all 135 16"x16" pavers. In fact, I did. I plunked down $630 for patio pavers over a week ago, $55 of which were for delivery. I bought these a week ago yesterday (Thursday) and arranged for a Monday afternoon delivery.

Sunday: Lowes called me and said they wanted to change it to Monday morning because they were borrowing a delivery truck and only had it during the morning. No problem. They said it'd be there between 7 and 8am.

Monday: At 7:45am, they called and said the promise of a borrowed truck was no good and they couldn't deliver on Monday. But they could bring it Tuesday morning, again between 7 and 8am.

Tuesday: At 7:15am, they called and said, "One of the pallets we were going to bring is full of broken pavers, so we don't actually have enough in stock to bring you your order. We are scheduled to get more on Friday and Monday. We may be able to get a pallet from another store, but I've got seven deliveries today and I also have to go to Logan, so I'm not making any promises." I'm starting to get seriously annoyed. At this point, I asked for a refund of my delivery fee ($55).

Wednesday: Nothing. No news.

Thursday: They called to say they finally got more pavers, but it was raining all day and they wondered if we wanted them. We told them no because they'd be driving on our back lawn and we wouldn't be doing any paver installation. Next day is fine.

Friday: I called Lowes at 7:20am to see what the status is. Luckily, the delivery guy says they are loading our order and will have it at our house within an hour. FYI, we live about 3 miles from Lowes. They arrived at 8:45am with the load. Around 5pm, Jen emails me at work and says that some of the pavers have chipped corners and (!) they shorted us 7 pavers. These pavers are regularly $4.98 each (we got them for $3.98). I called Lowes when I got home to talk to the manager.

In his defense, the manager was very apologetic. He confirmed the free delivery, plus 9 replacement pavers. "Just come in and ask for Doug," he says. "And I hope you'll consider us in the future still." I replied, "Well, we are planning to re-build a deck in the near future and wanted to get our lumber at Lowes." He said, "We have free deck planning software and we'll get you a discount on your lumber."

Nice.

So we send Jen to the store around 8pm to get the 9 replacement pavers (I pulled a muscle in my back this morning). Turns out they had none in stock. The manager then decided that he would just give us 9 free pavers when they came in, not just replace the ones that were missing. That's about $40 in free pavers for our troubles.

Can't wait to see what kind of lumber discount we can get with this ammunition.