Menards

I love Menards, but I may be biased.
I worked in retail for years. YEARS! At one point I spent a few years working at Lowe’s. It wasn’t pleasant. Their goal was to have as few people working in a store as possible, while telling you to both help customers and take care of stock.
Once I stopped working there, I only shopped there if they had something I couldn’t find anywhere else. Thank goodness for Menards!
If you’ve shopped at these stores over the years, you may have noticed the same thing I have. Lowe’s went from being the big daddy to the little chump. They took out check out lanes, and reduced lot at the front end because Menards stole a LOT of business. As of today, it looks like Menards is going to expand, too. While I don’t generally like a store that’s too large, I think I will love a larger Menards.
Always plenty of people around, they have a great selection, awesome prices, and you can get almost anything you want there.
The only snag is shopping when they are busy at an odd hour. They have had a policy of opening another register when 2 or more people are in a line, and once in a great while they don’t quite have enough staff to pull it off.
No matter what, though, I come back. I just love this place.

Unless you’re a masochist and derive perverse satisfaction from being treated like dirt, go to Menards instead of Lowes. The selection, prices and customer service here are much better compared with Lowes. Having just recently arrived in Bloomington, I’ve been frequenting home improvement stores a lot these days to get my apartment set up. Each of my visits to Menards has been good and without incident, except for my first time there, when a carpentry sales representative purposefully sent me to the wrong section (cabinets) when I asked for directions. When the cabinetry sales representative called him to ask why he sent me to the wrong section, he didn’t seem to have an excuse. Fortunately, the cabinetry sales representative knew what she was doing and provided excellent help. In addition, aside from the carpet department, all the other sales representatives are friendly and provide good service. Even when I called their building materials department for questions, the person at the other end of the line was very polite and courteous.

We usually prefer Menards to Lowes, however don’t go in close to closing time. We were in tonight, the kid in the paint dept gave my husband some stupid excuse for not opening the paint can to check the color, after pointing out the he knows he should open it. Apparently all their employees were busy doing closing duties because they had one check out open with about 6 people in line. And of course the lady checking out was too lazy to even stand up to make any of the process faster. We really wish a Home Depot would come to Bloomington.

My husband had a bad encounter returning something today. The man helping him was unusually rude, eventually the manager went up and helped him because this guy was just clearly giving my husband a hard time for no reason. Wish we had gotten the guys name, he was not nice at all. Never returning because of this, going to Lowes now on, won’t spend money where people are jerks to costumers.

It is astonishing the difference between the customer service at Lowes vs Menards. In the past 2 months I have spent a lot of time in home improvement stores. The Menards employees are so helpful, happy, bright, and seem to really enjoy their jobs. I have found the opposite to be true at Lowes. I really appreciate this level of customer service. It is obvious that this company cares more for the welfare of it’s employees.

Wayne, the dept. mgr in lighting needs to be employee of the month! I had purchased a contemporary vanity light for my bathroom, and when we were installing it, one of the glass globes crashed onto the newly tiled floor, breaking into a zillion pieces. I got online and looked it up on Menard’s website. You could order one for $ 9.99, but they didn’t have the option to ship it to the store, so the shipping was going to cost an extra $ 15. On top of that there was SIX WEEK wait!!! I called the store and got Wayne in the lighting department. He was so nice, and listened to my story, and then looked it up. He said that he had one that they were not putting back on display, so that I could have two of the globes NO CHARGE!!! I couldn’t believe it, and it was on my birthday, so that was a GREAT present. Thanks Wayne and thanks Menards! I’ll be telling everyone about the excellent customer service!

I gotta say I prefer Menards to the bigger home improvement stores like Lowes or Home Depot. They have a huge selection (including non-​traditional home improvement stuff like pet supplies, cleaners, etc). Staff is pretty friendly and the prices are very reasonable.