I wish I could be leaving a better review, but my first (and probably last) trip to this location was a disappointment.
I'd initially put together an order through their site, but after seeing it advertised (both on the site and through third party reviews) that the company offered price-matching, I opted to drive an hour out to the shop so I could paint tonight. I'm an avid painter and need supplies regularly, and had hoped this would be a good location for a bi-monthly restock trip, rather than stick to my usual boring habit of just buying through Blick online.
The staff seemed friendly initially, asked if I needed help etc, I explained my online shopping list and asked, again, if they price matched. The guy helping assured me they did, and mentioned something about them having to factor in "the shipping cost" to the total (which is bizarre given that I'm standing here buying it and nothing is being shipped, but whatever, according to the site my "shipping cost" was $9.78, or free with a code, something I could deal with).
So cool, spent another hour gathering up my stuff again, all is well. It was a little weird that on several occasions employees would peek around the aisles and stare like they thought I was planning to pocket a $4 paintbrush or something, but whatever. That's retail.
When I go to check out, the General Manager is running the register and the guy who helped me is with him. I mentioned again that I have price matches through the site and had already discussed some of them with the employee. The GM says that's fine, and mentions that their software 'auto-matches' the site and chooses the lower value, so there's no need to pull anything up on my phone. Fair enough. Except that after being rung in, the total is nearly $30 higher than my cart online. I double check everything and ask about the large difference, and offer to show it to him. He scrolls through my cart on my phone, says something about the shipping cost being factored in. I have a coupon for free shipping, which isn't applicable in this case I guess, but even without it the shipping for my order is just under $10... not $29. He fumbles around an explanation, saying something about having to read the small print... nonspecific small print that wasn't mentioned the first two times I asked, isn't on the site as far as we could find, and nothing that clarifies why, if their system matches the lowest price, it's still 30% higher than what I'm quoted online.
He seemed confused, shrugs and offers 10% off the total purchase, which still doesn't bring it close to what I'd pay to just... go sit in the parking lot and order it. And I know that employees don't have a say in how their corporate software works, but surely this isn't the first time this has happened. As a GM I'd hoped for a bit more help in the way of 'price matching', given I was assured multiple times, by multiple people, that it was a policy they practiced regularly.
Ultimately I ended up not buying anything aside from a paint set that was cheaper in store than online anyway, and went back to my car and placed the original order after all.
It's a bummer that financially it's not worth visiting the Blick brick-and-mortar shop if they're not willing to adhere to their posted policies. I like browsing art supply stores but don't hate myself enough to step into places like H*bby L*bby, so I'd really hoped this would be a nice alternative for when the real-life shopping bug bit.
The extra star is for being willing to order something for me that was out of stock, but I opted to just buy it online since it was 36% cheaper anyway. read more