Grill

Our existing grill is not worth salvaging at this point. If M's memory serves her well (and it usually does), that grill is somewhere around 14-15 years old. It just has so much wear and tear on it now that it would cost us nearly as much as a new grill to get it up and running again.

So, we're looking for a new grill. We have researched, decided on our price range, and have shopped around. We finally found a grill at Home Depot that fit our needs, was within our budget AND on sale (so putting it from the higher end to the lower end of the budget), had coated racks (top and bottom), and was made in Canada. Perfect.

We have now attempted to purchase this grill three separate times from Home Depot. We have had poor service (except for partially on this last trip), and Home Depot just doesn't seem concerned about our business. They say that there are 13 of this unit on PEI, yet the SJ store sold out of the two they had the first day of the sale and it is marked as "no auto-reorder" so they won't be getting any more back in stock.

The woman today at Customer Service was fairly helpful; she did her best to find out what was going on, if they could get it for us, and took my name and phone number and was going to have the head of the department or the one in charge of ordering call us back today. It is now 20 till 10pm and I don't think that call is coming. This would be the third time that Lindsay (the one in charge of ordering) has been less than helpful or completely dismissive.

On our way out of the East side, we saw a sign at Harbor City Propane that said "Broil King BBQ, Free Assembly" and decided to stop in. For $50 more than the sale price of the very similar grill at Home Depot, we can get a Canadian-made grill, of similar size, assembled for free, and we are patronizing a local business and will get a far superior warranty on the product with local support. Win-win, in our books.

What Home Depot doesn't understand or is chosing to ignore is that every single disgruntled customer actually represents a total of 10 such customers. So, our complaints to them about this grill not being in stock should indicate to them that there are 9 other people who have wanted that grill and have gone elsewhere or settled for something else. So, when they told us it would cost them $250 to ship a single grill from PEI to SJ for us and, since that grill was on sale for $300, it wasn't worth their effort, what they failed to understand is that shipping ten of those grills would have netted them a $50 profit on ten grills PLUS made ten customers happy and more loyal customers, coming back for things like grill covers, propane tanks, lighters, etc. Instead, they have chosen to drive off those ten customers, made at least a few of them tell their friends of their bad experience, and making even more than the original ten people unhappy.

Anyway, we plan to go back tomorrow and purchase our new grill from a local store. We're doing our part for the local economy and for the economy in general by buying Canadian (which we both feel is important, especially since the vast majority of grills in our price-range come from China -- a country that is happy to export anything but does not allow more than 1% of its imports from North America). I think we'll be very happy and satisfied with our purchase. And, if we're not, we will have local support to fall back on to make it right.

Addendum:
The new grill works like a champ. We had Jenn and Stew over for steak and, except for me misremembering how they like their and overcooking it a bit for them, the meal was quite good. Last night, M and I made pork loin marinated in red-wine vinaigrette, grilled potatoes, and some veggies. The meat was done a solid medium, was still juicy, and tasted great with either more dressing or with applesauce. Yum!