Liars at the Paint Desk

Well, it's Sunday and I have the day off... and I also have a lot of chores to do both inside and outside the house.  Yesterday, however, I had to work and that meant dealing with idiots.  There was the guy who was looking for a ecologically safe way to remove tar from his driveway... and he'd seen some product advertised on television.  He couldn't quite remember the name but was sure the commercial said we carried it.  I know I don't carry anything like that, so I used our app to search for a product similar to what he wanted.  Nothing.  So I said "I'm sorry, we don't carry anything like that," and his snappy retort was "well, I guess I'm going to have to take my business to your competition."  This was supposed to be his way of insulting me, of pissing me off... we hear it daily.
Then there was the gentleman who stepped up to the paint desk with his wife, a gallon of exterior Glidden in his hand.  "This paint is bad," he said.  I checked the label on the lid and saw the paint had been tinted in March of 2013 and said, "this paint is over 3 years old."  He got a little surly and said "look inside the can."  I did and saw immediately what the problem was, this can of paint had been been frozen.  "No," he said, "I take care of my paint, I keep it in the basement.  This is bad paint.  I want another can."  I very politely told him that I couldn't give him another gallon of paint.  "This is 3 years old," I repeated.  His eyes narrowed, then he and his wife walked away.

Five minutes later he was standing in front of me for a second time.  "Brandon says you're supposed to give me another can of paint," he smiled.  Brandon was the other MOD working yesterday afternoon.  Now what I really wanted to do was call him a lying sack of shit, but I couldn't really do that, so without saying a word, I mixed him another gallon.

When I asked Brandon about it he said "Dave, I was at the Service Desk and there were people all around and this guy came up and started getting loud."  I asked him if he'd looked in the can.  "Yeah," he said, "that paint had been frozen, and that guy just looked me in the eye and lied right to my face."  In the end it had been easier just to give this liar another gallon of paint just to shut him up.  Personally, I would have preferred kicking his sorry ass out of the store.  We shouldn't be paying for his mistakes.

Glidden bamboozle

Of course some wouldn't call it a bamboozle, and many would no doubt interpret the action as pure deception on the part of a customer.  The customer did deceive us by trickery which pretty much the definition of bamboozle.  This person did think he was smarter then the associates who work at the paint desk, however he failed to understand that people who work with paint daily tend to know their paint.  It's not as though we were actually bamboozled because as soon as I heard his complaint I said "that guy's full of shit."  Of course the incident happened long before my shift started so I was unable to grab him by his lapels and shake the crap out of him, all the while asking him did he think we were really that stupid?

What happened?  A customer came into the Returns desk shrieking about how the 5 gallon bucket of Glidden paint was the worst he'd ever bought.  And evidently he did shriek as he demanded to speak to a manager.  He shrieked "this paint doesn't even stay on my walls, it runs down them! It's terrible!  Terrible!" at least this is how the scene was described to me.

Exhibit A, found at the scene of the crime

Anyway, when I got to work and heard about the complaint, I brought the bucket of paint to the desk for a thorough examination.  After putting it in the paint shaker for 3 minutes, I unscrewed the cap and shoved a wooden paint stirrer deep into the full bucket.  When I pulled out the stirrer the paint ran off, there was no adherence what so ever.  So I touched the paint and rolled it around between my fingers (paint people do that) and it felt funny.  Lifting the stirrer up to my nose I smelled it (we all know paint has a bit of a scent), except this didn't smell like paint.  Finally, I dabbed a bit onto the lid, next to the sample dot the associate had put there when the paint had been mixed.  Of course I knew they weren't going to match. You see I'd already figured out the customer had actually returned about 1.5 gallons of paint and about 3.5 gallons of water.  In fact, there was just enough of the original paint in the bucket to give it the correct color, no more, no less.

Sadly enough, in addition to giving the shrieking customer a refund, they also gave him 3 additional gallons of free paint.  One can only wonder if he truly though he was outsmarting us.  Then again maybe he didn't care.  Maybe all he needed the lie to work for a small period of time, just long enough for him to bamboozle us.

Cheaper than Hell

There is nothing wrong with being frugal.  There is a difference, however, between being frugal and being cheap.  As someone who manages a paint desk, I see both types of people, especially when it comes to selling a home.  A frugal person will choose the paint which is going to give the best coverage at the lowest price possible.  The cheap individual buys cheap paint and hopes the potential buyer doesn't notice.  I see many more of the latter.  Yesterday I saw three of them.  There was the gentleman (and I use that word loosely) who bought fence stain for a deck.  I told him the product was only meant for vertical surfaces.  His reply?  I'm selling the house, the deck only needs to look good for 3 - 4 months.  Hopefully his house will not sell for 6 or 7 months and he will need to stain it again.  Spend a little more money and give the customer a good deal.  In the end, he may end up spending more then the $40 dollars he's saving by cheaping it out.  So, if you're buying an existing home and it has a deck, you may not want to put in a bid the first day it's on the market.

Then there was the couple who wanted cheap paint that would give them on coat coverage.  It seems her mother passed away and they were going to sell the house.  I explained that one coat coverage was going to cost them.  She didn't want to hear this.  She said (and this is a quote) "If I spend that money, I'm not going to get it back, and that doesn't count the time it's going to take me to paint."  And I'm thinking, hey, you're selling house.  When that sale goes through you're going to be getting money.  Why are you dicking around about an extra $100 in paint?  Of course, she doesn't see it that way.  All she sees it the fact that she's going to have to spend money her own money in order to sell that house.

And finally, there was the young woman who purchased an Glidden tester with an eggshell finish to patch up a semi-gloss wall.  Eggshell on Semi?  When I told her the difference in finishes was going to very obvious she said "it's in the basement, they'll never notice."  Actually, a good real estate agent is going to notice and she'll either have to repaint, or drop her price.

If you're making the investment of buying a home, you want to know you're going to be getting the biggest bang for your buck. The last thing you want is close the deal and find out you've been scammed by some cheapskate.  And not everybody is like these three.  Most of the customers I see are honorable.  Not everybody is cheaper then hell.

How idiots choose a paint color

For those of you who don't know, I manage the paint department for a very large home improvement retailer.  This means I know a little bit about color, about how light effects color, and a smidgen about what colors go together.  The worst thing a customer can do is to walk in, look at the paint swatches on a sample wall and choose a color without any consideration to the lighting in the room, or the furnishings, or the flooring, all things which are going to effect the way that color is going to look after it has been applied to the walls.  One of the best things a potential customer can do is to purchase a paint tester, one of those little 8 oz jars of paint.  This gives them an idea as to just what their room is going to look like when finished.  However, there are some people who just don't understand this process.  I call them the 10% people.  They are the ones who believe paint department associates can minutely manipulate the amount of tint added to these testers to give them the precise, original color they want.  These individuals want designer paints.  They want to be able to brag to their friends about how long it took to get the precise shade they needed for their walls.  These people are idiots.

Let me give you an example.  About a week ago a mother and daughter approached one of my paint associates with a paint swatch which was a pale coral color.  That color, however, was just a tad too light for them so they had the associate adjust the color up by 55%.  One evening, a few days ago, they returned and talked to me.  The tester was just not the right color.  They wanted me to add 10% more tint.  I didn't laugh at them.  I did try to explain that in a 8 oz tester there is not a lot of tint and since they had already applied some of the paint to a wall it was not even a full tester.  In their sample there was 1 drop of black.  It is impossible to add 10% of one drop, even if the tester were full.  I could have given them what they wanted in a new tester, but that wasn't what they wanted.  I didn't even try to explain how a 10% adjustment would be was so negligible the difference would have been imperceptible.  So I added 4 drops of red and 3 drops of yellow to make them happy.  After shaking the sample up, I put a dot on the lid next to the original dot so they could compare the colors.  There was no change.  The mother looked at her daughter and asked "Do you think it's too dark now?" and the daughter replied.  "We need to think about this."

Paint tester hell.

You see the whole thing had nothing to do with the shade of the color, making it just 10% darker.  It did have quite a lot to do with control.  Of course they couldn't admit both dots looked the same, that would have meant admitting failure.  So, they were going to go home and think about it.  In the end, if they paint the room, I suspect they will go with the original color, that tends to be what these 10% people do.  Of course a lot of them are never going to be satisfied.  I worked with a couple who both happened to be dentists, and who probably went through  7 or 8 different shades of gray, having them adjusted up and down, matching them to different paint swatches, and noting each time the adjustment was either too dark or too light.  They ended up going with Dolphin Fin, one of the first testers I made for them.  For these people it is all about controlling the process.  They need to be in charge.  In the end they will tell friends and neighbors how it took "so many hours," to get precisely the color they needed.  These people are idiots.