My Experience with Home Depot vs. Lowe's

We make jokes about it but we'll admit it to anyone - we are obsessed and almost daily customers at The Home Depot store in various locations around Connecticut and Western Massachusetts. We might refer to the store as a home creepo, home cheepo, the depot, or the homey store but it's a fact, we like the Home Depot stores.

When my husband and I started our Painting LLC in 1999 we went to local vendors and asked for credit terms. The Home Depot was one of the few places that gave us what we needed right away to get us off the ground. With a painting contract, the terms and conditions cover the materials, the services, the touch ups and then when the job is done, we get paid.

Often times, we have to "carry" the costs of materials until the job is completed. That can get expensive when you have several homes going at once. Home Depot worked with us to give us a line of credit for our business so we could keep earning more money while we waited on our customers to pay our invoices.

Another reason we liked the Home Depot stores was because they had a contractor aisle that made it easy for us to get in and out of the store. Waiting in cashier lines means losing profits. Most of the time we would use the self checkout register but it was nice to have the contractor check out if we had larger items.

As we became more aware of pricing for certain sundries at competing stores, we found ourselves obsessed with shopping at The Home Depot even if it was out of our way because we found out it was cheaper. Not only was the staff friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable but in some cases we were saving upwards of 20 percent or more on sundries such as painter's tape, painter's paper and roller handles.

A few years later, when we remodeled our own home we decided to try Lowe's. They had a guy in their kitchen cabinet area of the store that really worked with us to help us with our designer kitchen. In the end, our kitchen cabinet design came up to something like $30,000.

When we went to buy them, the store wouldn't approve our credit request, so even though we had $100 K in the bank - plenty to cover the cabinets, we decided we didn't like their attitude and condescending credit terms. As a result, we cut back our kitchen cabinet order to $13K and gave Lowes the cash for that.

Then we took the balance of our money and went back over to the Home Depot. There we bought material for a dog house dormer, six skylights, a Jacuzzi tub, kitchen and bathroom faucets, sinks and countertops on credit. We paid our bill within the month and didn't really need to use credit but we wanted to be sure we had the extra cash in the bank if something unexpected had happened during our remodel. Lesson learned for us was that Home Depot wanted our business and they were willing to work with us, whereas Lowes was not.

Since then, Home Depot is our preferred home improvement store choice - for not only our business, but for our personal needs as well.