I paid Home Depot, Champaign for a dishwasher and its installation and had one of my worst ever customer experiences. Long story short: I'm not making the case that if you buy a major appliance from them, you're guaranteed to have a bad experience. I'm instead making the case that if something goes wrong with your purchase, their appliance department will not have your back. They will not listen to you; they will not advocate for you. You're going to have to fight tooth-and-nail for your own rights as a customer. Given my experience with the installation team that the appliance department hires, something may very well go wrong. The service I got on my order was truly horrendous, and if I ever need another major appliance in Champaign, I will be taking my business either to Lowe's or a smaller company like Dick van Dyke's. This experience took a total of two days to resolve despite being an open-and-shut case. I have a more detailed review on their Facebook page-- Yelp has a word limit.
The installation team had left my house with a dishwasher that wasn't draining, and refused to return to fix it even though I called them about it 20 minutes after they left. Additionally, according to my handy-man whom I had hired to fix their mistakes, they were apparently incompetent and had made very basic and avoidable mistakes, which not only accounted for the unit's inability to drain, but also accounted for all the other problems they had encountered during their visit:
1) they had forgotten to turn the power off to the kitchen before starting work, tripping the dishwasher connection. They didn't even think to check the breakers after realizing that the connection wasn't supplying power anymore, and had concluded that my wiring was faulty. Consequently, they hooked the unit up to my garbage disposal outlet. They would have known that the connection was fine, only tripped, had they gotten the idea to check the breaker box. I think a working knowledge of a breaker box is the bare minimum you would ask for from an installation team.
2) they did not remove the knockout plug in the drainage pipe, which was why the dishwasher was not draining. The knockout plug is a standard fixture of any disposal-to-dishwasher connection because you don't want water and food to flow into your cabinet before you've installed a dishwasher. I was told that the first thing any competent dishwasher installer does is remove the knockout plug.
3) they had failed to align the dishwasher parallel to the counter-- one side of the unit was protruding. They had also failed to adjust its height using the legs it came with, leaving an unsightly gap between the unit and the counter.
4) this is the WORST of their mistakes: upon "concluding" that my dishwasher connection was "faulty," they had taped the wires up with positive and negative touching. My handy-man tells me that because of this, if I had untripped the breaker that they had tripped, I would have started a fire in my house.
Despite all this, Kowana, Home Depot's appliance dept manager, kept insisting that the problems were my own. She blatantly ignored my grievances, and even rudely told me that I could ask for a refund on the purchase if I wasn't happy with their service.
Later on, when I had decided to keep the dishwasher that my handy-man had re-installed successfully, I asked for a refund on the installation fee instead. Bill, the manager of the delivery-and-installation company Home Depot hires, refused. He insisted that his company dealt with "basic installs," and that the problems I had raised were outside their scope, which was crazy since the problems were caused by basic installation screw-ups. Kowana also would not let go of an inconsequential misunderstanding. She had thought that the wiring was "faulty" because it had been installed by my friend, instead of my professional handy-man. How she ignored the fact that my handy-man had found that the wiring was fine, but only tripped, and continued pursuing this misunderstanding shows just how actively unhelpful she was. How both Bill and Kowana ignored the fact that the team had left my house and our lives in danger with the badly-managed wires is testament to how little either of them care about their customers.
Bill ended up giving me that refund, but not before a shouting match, and certainly no thanks to Kowana, who started tending to other customers while unmuted and still on the call with us.
All in all, an installation that should have taken up less than 30 minutes of my time burned through 5 hours of my work day, and then some more of the next morning. My experience buying a dishwasher from Home Depot, Champaign was disgustingly unpleasant. read more