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21 responses total.

  K-mart does suck, and it's in a place the customer can't see, in corporate
HQ. I remember a few yrs back when K-mart canned about 150 people right before
christmas. That was vindictive and evil. I will not buy a pack of gum from
K-mart. 
  Meijer, while not the best place to shop, still has $5 paperbacks, a pretty
good selection, and mostly friendly people. Thier corporate citizenship is
stellar as well. Meijer is also a pretty decent job (used to work there)


  It is state law that all products for sale must be tagged. You should call
the Attorney General about that Valerie, they would like to know, I'll bet.


 Wal-mart on the other hand is OK, but every store is the same and doesn't
differ from state to state. I had the opportunity to visit the Beckley
Wal-Mart in WV with frieda, and I could not find 1 item unique to the state,
be it food, a mug, well I did find UWV t-shirts, but that was about all I
found. And Wal-Mart still charges face value for paperbacks. In that regard,
I will be a Meijer customer for a long, long time.

I've had the "looks like this thing is the one on sale but no way to tell
for sure" experience at Meijer many a time.  It's easy to deal with.  Just
load a bunch into your cart as if you knew they were on sale.  When you
get up to the check-out, ask the cashier to check the prices on the items
("I think this is the one that was on sale, but the sign wasn't really
clear....").  If it's on sale, no sweat.  If NOT....well, you don't want
to buy it at the higher price, so leave it with the cashier.  Feel no
guilt and show no remorse.  

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  There are more. The last time I was there (about 3 weeks ago) there were
scanners in the toy dept, the grocery aisle, and I seem to remember one near
the book dept, but I could be wrong about that last one.
  Maybe you should voice your concerns to management, Valerie. It has been
my experience that they really do listen to complaints.

Went to Meijer to get some cough syrup today  and of course it didn't
have a price.  So I asked the pharmacist to look it up.  I figure if
they get enough requests like that, they'll scream bloody murder at
whatever stockers aren't marking the prices.  Why scan it yourself?
Get an employee to do it!

I just take the unmarked item to the checkout and have them scan it.
It's their problem if I don't want to pay their secret price.  Right
now, about half the stuff at HQ is not marked.  They are going out of
business and most of the stuff is not priced.  I also get the feeling
that lots of prices were raised prior to this supposed "going out of
business sale."  I suspect that liquidators can get away with this sort
of practice because they are constantly on the move making it difficult
to crack down on them.

Larry and I were completely disgusted with out attempts to shop at HQ
recently.  not only was nothing marked, but when we did take a chance and
bought a lawn mower, it took three trips to get the whole thing.  *We weren't
allowed to open the box before purchase, but someone had -- pieces were
missing from all of the boxes!  From then on, we've gone to Builders Square.

I had the "not allowed to open the box" syndrom thrown at me at Best Buy. The
salesperson told me I could buy the product, take it home, and return it if
I didnt like it.

I explained to the manager we could do this the hard way or the easy way. 
The easy way was for them to let me take the item(s) that I wanted to compare
out of the box, and examine them.
The hard way was for me to take one item at a time, go through checkout and
charge it to my credit card, stand just the other side of checkout and examine
it, and then return it to the customer service desk nearby, getting the refund
credited to my charge card.  I was willing to do this for as many iterations
as it took to examine all the items I wanted to compare.  

They decided it would cost them less to have an employee watch me take things
out of the box and make one transaction, than to have several employees
involved in several transactions.  

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re 8:
        I think that's the point at which I usually ask them if they want my
business or not.  If they want me to buy it from them, they will do it in a
way I find reasonable.  If they want me to jump through all those hoops I'll
go to the competition and buy it.  I don't have time to play games with
taking everything through the checkout multiple times.

Yep, HQ is going down the drain.  One source I talked to said that Builders
Square had bought them out!  They decided that the A^2 HQ and Builders
Square were too close together so HQ is being shut down.  I'm glad I found
out about it in time as I had a HQ gift certificate to use up!  Wound up
picking though the rubble and getting stuff for the house I'm building...
 
My wife doesn't like K-Mart.  She has seen them advertise stuff in the
paper, only to discover that the store hasn't had that item in stock for
weeks and they weren't expecting to get it any time soon.  They would give
her a rain-check though.  This happened to her several times, years ago.

*Grin* sgc, I probably wouldnt have bothered either.  But I thought since I
was standing there with a product in hand that I was interested in, I would
see if I could talk them into doing it my way.  I didnt know another handy
place to buy this particular electronic gadget.  

And you can bet I've never gone back into that store.  No customer should have
to work that hard to see what it is they are buying.

Once I picked up an unmarked carbom monoxide detector at a discount store.
I had them get me a price for it at the checkout and decided to buy it.  I
was shocked to see it on sale in the following Sundays paper for $10 more!

The Builders Square chain is in financial trouble according to
a recent newspaper article. So I'm a bit surprised to hear that
they're buying out the competition.

Costco is the company that bought out HQ.  Apparently the HQ on Carpenter just
wasn't profitable anyway.

I can imagine.  I heard, from a colleague, that HQ and Builders Square
were bought up by some third party.  It also seems that the corner
hardware stores are doing better these days.  My personal favorite is
Stadium hardware.  They also seem to cater to professionals as well as
Mr & Ms Homeown

I go to Builder's or HQ if I know exactly what I need, and I go to Stadium
if I have dumb questions.  I go to Ace Barnes (also on Stadium Blvd) a lot
because it is walking distance from work.

Stadium is definitely my favorite for obscure stuff & expert advise.  Ace
Barnes (NOT the one on Washtenaw, thought they're improving) is my second
choice (first if shopping for housewares).  Though I really should get
to Jack's and East Ann Arbor Hardware more often.

We do buy things in K-Mart, but I hate to go in there. Every time I go 
in, the store has been rearranged, so i don't know where anything is. 
When I ask an employee, they don't know either, because it is just as 
new to them.

They routinely put things on sale and do not stock them. It's very 
annoying. 

One thing they have added recently is a food section. While it looks 
lame as a general purpose grocery store, and the checkouts are 
DEFINITELY not designed to handle food coming through, they do seem to 
have good quality milk in all fat-content denominations for an every-day 
price of $1.99. You can beat this occasionally in supermarkets when they 
have a big milk sale, but when they don't have such a sale, we're 
getting our milk in K-Mart and saving $.50/gallon.

Meijer, otoh, is annoying for all the reasons Valerie stated, but I love 
their hours. For things I know they carry, I go there regularly. We eat 
loads of raisins -- bulk raisins at Meijer for $1.49/lb all the time.

We still buy most of our groceries in Kroger, though, for convenience.

Oh yeah - stadium hardware has great people. If "Mike" doesn't know what 
you need, no one does. There's no better place to go. 

For simple hardware, I tend to go to Meijers, because they're open when I tend
to do my shopping.  If I need anything at all complicated, I go to Stadium
Hardware.  I used to use one or the other of the Ace Hardwares, but since the
day I couldn't find what I wanted there and went to Stadium Hardware for the
first time, I haven't been back to Ace.  I was far more impressed by Stadium.

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