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If you’ve ever decided to tackle a home improvement project, you already know that they don’t always go as planned and they usually cost more than what you originally anticipated.
With that in mind, it makes sense that homeowners will sometimes cut corners to save money any which way they can. One of the ways homeowners try to save money is by spending their home improvement dollars at big-box chains that sell flooring, garage door openers, toilets, lawnmowers, and everything in between.
We understand the draw of one-stop shopping, but just because you can purchase flooring at the same store where you bought your microwave doesn’t mean it’s a great idea. After all, do you honestly feel comfortable taking advice about flooring from someone that works in a different aisle of the store each day of the week? That employee might be a great person and a hard worker, but it’s difficult for one person to be an expert on every product in a store that sells 175,000 items.
Why You Should Shop at a Locally Owned Store and Not a Big-Box Chain
Often, you’ll see big-box stores advertise rock-bottom pricing that sounds too good to be true. As the old saying goes, anything that sounds too good to be true probably is too good to be true.
Big-box stores make ridiculous claims about how they do installation work at no additional cost to the customer. We won’t go so far as to call them liars, but ask yourself this question: Would you crawl around on your hands and knees for eight hours and perform backbreaking manual labor without receiving compensation for your efforts? We didn’t think so.
The installers the big-box stores subcontract their installation work to don’t work for free, either. The myth of free installation work is nothing more than a marketing gimmick; big-box chains build the cost of the installation into the cost of the materials before they put their wares on the store’s shelves.
When you spend your hard-earned dollars at a family owned business in your area, you stimulate your local economy by providing that business with the means to pay their employees and purchase wares from other businesses in your area.
A big-box chain doesn’t have the same commitment to customer satisfaction that a family-owned business does; if one of their customers isn’t happy they still have a million other customers in other cities and states to fill their coffers. A company owned by someone in your community depends on the business they receive from their friends and neighbors.
Your dollars don’t just go toward keeping the lights on at that business; your dollars help someone in accounts payable to pay for his daughter’s dance classes and someone in the marketing department to buy groceries for her family’s annual 4th of July cookout.
