Randy's has a very nice selection of materials, and there's no reason not to shop for them there. I'm sure you can buy cheaper online, but don't be a jerk about that; if you decide on your materials in-store, buy them locally.
Their operations are another story. My flooring...saga was bad enough that I won't go to them again, even though they did make good at the end when I refused to pay most of the cost of the labor on part of my flooring install. The sales and design staff are doing their best. I think the problem is in how Randy's running things.
In a way, I get what he's trying to do. He's pure "skills gap", he sees it's hard to find labor at the wages he's offering, he sees young people aren't going into these trades, and he's encouraging whoever he can find, trying to get them trained and involved. The problem -- and after talking to friends, I find that the problem wasn't a one-off with my job, but a pretty common experience with Randy's -- the problem is that these people are not by and large well-trained, and they'll show up, do a terrible job, and leave people stuck fighting to get it fixed.
That's part of the problem, anyway. The other part is that in his zeal to build a corps of guys -- and yes, they appear to be guy after guy after guy, I saw one woman in the whole parade and she was a subcontractor's wife -- he winds up doing things no retailer or contractor should be doing. I had a guy melting down in my kitchen because he couldn't figure out how to do part of the job, which had been poorly communicated by sales staff in the first place. The rest of the day went so poorly that I went online to find out if he got sued very often, and found that he'd had a domestic violence conviction not very long before. And there he was in my house shouting at me. And I was supposed to be paying him. The answer to all that was no.
Randy's response was to defend this guy's reputation to me. I'm not joking. I went in there to make it clear how things were going to go, and next thing I know, there's Randy telling me about what a great guy this dude is and trying to whitewash the event. I'm there with my hands up telling him I don't want to hear about this guy's life, and he keeps rolling right on, he's so anxious to defend the man's reputation above all else.
I get the impulse to give people a second chance. That's fine. What's not fine is foisting people with serious problems on your customers, especially in their own homes. You have to ASK. ASK PERMISSION. And say, "We have this guy, we really believe in him, he's had these problems, would it be all right if we assigned him the job." Some will say yes. But you also have to take no for an answer if the answer is no.
I'm not even going to go into the design debacle that happened after that. Enough to say that I wound up, at Randy's direction, unwittingly keeping a new mom late at work wrestling with wholly inadequate design software when (a) this lady needed to go home and be with her baby, rather than pay for other staff's earlier incompetence; and (b) Randy, spend the $75 for the actual design software your staff needs. And I could talk about the ridiculously long time it took just to place an order for materials and get installation scheduled there, because nobody seems to know what anyone else is doing, so if your salesperson for whatever reason doesn't respond (mine sometimes just slipped up, and then for part of the time he was off with a new baby himself) nobody else will pick up the ball, but I'm not going into that whole story either.
Overall, the whole experience convinced me to go back to doing these jobs myself. I wouldn't install my own carpet, but I can rip out vinyl and carpet, lay tile, cut and lay snap-together wood floors. Yes, it's a huge hassle, but I don't think Randy's did my wood flooring any faster than I would have, and I had to take a whole week off work to oversee these clowns anyway. Would've been even faster if I'd brought a friend in to help. And I'd have skipped a lot of unpleasantness.
The experience has also convinced me to seek out women tradespeople. I'd say that one of the biggest problems in this job, overall, from the first day I walked into the store, was the unwillingness of staff to actually listen to what I was saying and take it seriously before things got to the point of being heated. I walked in with a pretty clear idea of what I was looking for and was told I didn't want that; I made the mistake of thinking "oh, maybe he's right," and of course wasted weeks circling back to the thing I actually wanted. When I pointed out parts of the job that would be difficult and needed planning, I got there-there'd, and then of course they weren't planned for and turned into trouble. Kept on happening throughout the job, with the exception of the one wood flooring guy they sent who knew his business, though even he left a water problem I wound up managing into the wee hours.
So. Caveat emptor. read more
