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I truly wish I could be surprised at the hour-long waste of my time masquerading as a phone call to settle the dispute over Lowe’s worst installation failure ever in my experience.

And as we’re now up to Episode V of the “Lowe’s Really Blows” saga here in “Harrowing Tales of Customer Service”, it seems kind of appropriate in a rather twisted way that it seems like I’m trapped in “The Empire Strikes Back” (Episode V of “Star Wars” for the non-nerds reading this!) which didn’t exactly go swimmingly for the Rebels.

We had left this yesterday in the hands of Julie “partnering” with upper-management over the claim for compensatory compensation relating to the utter disaster that was the first installation attempt for the new refrigerator.

I already wasn’t impressed with the whole existence of this “appeasement department” (much less it’s pejorative name) or the idea of trying to negotiate the settlement after the fact.

So it should come as no surprise after some amount of “consideration”, the best and final offer Lowe’s could come up with is…wait for it…$600.

That’s truly stunning…but not exactly surprising. Quelle surprise.

If I needed any more confirmation that the prediction I had made that leaving this conversation until after the installation would be Lowe’s having zero incentive to negotiate in good faith and accept true accountability for the disaster that was entirely a result of the negligence of the third-party contractor performing what should be a core competency Lowe’s would have been better suited to keep in house.

So essentially a day or two of “management” and “upper-management” supposedly considering all of the relevant evidence that had been provided in print-out form to Ms Kayla and was posted online in what is fast becoming an epic series of articles on just how ineffective and poor their processes and customer support’s upper management are in practise and truly the best they could come up with all of that time is…exactly what I already had from Ms Kayla two days prior with two less days of stress and anxiety over a fight I genuinely really wasn’t looking forward to having.

I truly cannot see how people who are supposedly educated and competent could look at everything that happened between the first installer failing to turn off the valve and nearly flooding the kitchen which sabotaged the installation to the time the second installer installed the refrigerator with no issues whatsoever and come to the conclusion that everything that happened in between those two events reflected anything close to the service experience Lowe’s supposedly wishes to provide it’s “valued customers”.

Feel free to take as long as you wish with that.

Even trying to be as understanding as humanly possible, I just can’t find one instance where Lowe’s employees during that long period of time that brought any credit to their employer whatsoever.

Four of those employees demanding that I ring up a plumber for a shut-off valve that a general contractor who works with Lowe’s and is an expert at plumbing (and who buys from Lowe’s thousands of dollars of product to complete renovation projects which is now in jeopardy) determined not only did not need mending and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt the installer never turned the valve off.

Then three more days of useless delays until a second attempted installation could be made where their customer who is already angry and frustrated gets to walk past the inoperative refrigerator and be reminded of the whole debacle and who was responsible for it.

Please tell me where Lowe’s did *ANYTHING* in that time frame to actually make the situation better?

I’d be more than happy to give them credit for it against the claim I’m seeking but I’m not finding anything having replayed the events in my mind many times and no one amongst the at least ten people I’ve talked to since feels that Lowe’s should get anything for such an utter failure on their part.

If even one person attempted to go above and beyond to try to salvage the situation in the 5-6 hours we had on Saturday, then that $600 offer might be meaningful and appreciated.

But…no.

I’ve got nothing but good things to say about the second installation team and Ms Kayla, the latter whose hands are tied by policies that are as asinine and anti-consumer as they come. Also, Ms Julie has been pleasant to speak with even though she’s equally shackled by the poor combination of zero authority and a metric tonne of poor policy she’s forced to live with.

But all of these people came after the failed installation attempt, not in the period between the failure and the second installation. Every minute of that intervening period is a failure of Lowe’s and Lowe’s alone.

So is it any wonder that anyone who has endured such poor treatment at Lowe’s hands would be highly insulted by Lowe’s wasting two days to come back to a number I already had achieved on my own with Ms Kayla?

That was the exact opposite of what I was hoping for when I told Ms Julie that if I were going to be forced to have to accept this “partnering with upper-management” process that it needed to land in front of someone who actually cares and wishes to negotiate in good faith.

One could dare to dream.

They didn’t even try and seriously want me to believe they couldn’t sweeten that settlement at least a reasonable amount in the direction of what I was claiming?

If they’d upped my side of the settlement to $600 and also agreed to pay Miguel’s $400 (which is non-negotiable…they demanded him so they’re going to pay for him above and beyond what they end up paying me as the separate claim it is), I’d have at least felt they were taking this claim seriously and there would have likely been a strong chance we could come to a number we could both live with.

But doubling-down on the number I already had rejected out-of-hand prior to their engagement shows just that the entire “appeasement team” and pretty much all of the management and upper-management beyond them are in desperate need of redundancy notices and a one-way trip to the dole queue as being surplus to requirements.

They’ve probably got metrics that show that most consumers probably give up in frustration accepting that any deal offered further down the road will be even worse which is the only way I can possibly explain such stubborn and recalcitrant behaviour on their part.

It was disappointing, but not surprising.

What was surprising was the introduction of a character that this epic tale of woe had been missing up this point…a true villain.

Even the first installer whose epic mistake set these unfortunate events in motion really wasn’t a villain. In fact, Miguel’s initial suggestion was that the third-party installation company would serve themselves well by offering additional training to him so that he might not make a similar mistake in the future.

Normally such a howler ends up as man overboard…here’s your hat and your box of personal items and off you pop to the job centre. Neither of us even suggested that anyone involved in this fiasco to be outright fired until the very end of the call on Saturday and that out of sheer frustration at the absolute absurdity confronting us from people who were supposed to be some measure of “customer support”.

In my case, I had questioned their usefulness and inability to solve the problems Lowe’s had created but never really wished for someone to be terminated.

Nor was I was expecting the two from the overseas call centre to be fired, either. The past few years experience with just how useless outsourced call centres can be (Equifax, anyone?) is that it’s pointless to try to get the people staffing those call centres fired. They have zero power and less accountability and frankly are exploited badly enough at poor wages and even worse working conditions as it is by American corporations who care only about wealthy shareholders.

The modern corporate group-think seems to be outsource everything one can, give the shareholders another yacht or beach house and the customer can just deal with a far less quality “customer service” or “customer experience” because they just don’t have many other alternatives.

But just when we thought we might not have a baddie in the narrative, a “supervisor” and/or “manager” named Joe ended up on the line.

Actually he admitted he was monitoring the call with Ms Julie all along but never announced his presence which whilst it’s not illegal in North Carolina, it is more than a little bit sketchy and not at all aboveboard and honest which does Lowe’s no credit for fair dealing.

The reason companies like pulling that stunt is that it allows that new person to come in and ambush the customer and Joe most certainly did that when he came in hot with guns blazing.

Right away, it was clear he had two goals in mind and was not going to be dissuaded from either:

• He was going to establish some measure of dominance and try to put me in my place as far as he was concerned.
• He had zero interest in anything but that the $600 that had been pronounced upon high and blessed by the holy scripture of policy is non-negotiable.

I got the distinct impression he’s not used to people taking a contrary point of view, much less advocating for themselves in doing so.

That was exceptionally clear when I tried to correct something he’d said that was wildly inaccurate and he demanded that “I don’t talk over him because he hadn’t done that to me”.

Considering that’d we’d only had less than a minute of conversation to that point, his entire demeanour seemed overly aggressive if not outright rude pretty much from the off which made the whole interaction with him awkward at best exemplified by a long silence after that particular diatribe from him until he asked if I was still there.

I calmly pointed out that in the intervening 20 seconds, he’d given no overt indication that I had his leave to speak.

That calm and measured response of mine should have been his first clue of many that his attitude and behaviour was completely bang out of order and unprofessional and that he’d already crossed the line of blatant disrespect which in any organisation that had even a smidgen of awareness of the concept of honour would consider a terminating offence on the spot.

He’s hardly the inconvenienced party in this conversation!

In fact, I’ve made it clear all along that anyone outside of Ms Kayla being allowed to settle this at the store level without all of these other people getting involved was far preferable and his bullying behaviour indicative of the “bad cop” to Ms Julie’s “good cop” was a glaring example of why.

Soon after that, he accused me of insulting Ms Julie multiple times during the conversation.

I’ll readily admit that I observed several times from my point of view that the “management” and “upper-management” Ms Julie had “partnered” with were clearly incompetent per se if they could waste all of this time diddling about like some useless committee and take all of the information that had been provided by me in written form plus proof in the form of pictures and come to the conclusion that the settlement I already had without their involvement would be sufficient and their final word on the subject.

If that’s truly what they believe, then they are even less intelligent than I judge them to be if not outright dangerous to keep on Lowe’s payroll.

However, when I pressed Joe on that point to provide even one example of me being insulting to her personally and/or saying anything that was not actually true, he chose to intentionally evade that question with something along the lines of “I’m not going to spend the time getting into that”.

Translation: his multiple accusations against my character were an out-and-out lie and he was caught out on a RECORDED CONVERSATION telling porkies to a customer and didn’t want to take accountability for his slanderous and contemptuous words and demeanour.

Once again, I ask him to provide any insight to the supposed decision-making process from above.

And this is the moment where Joe’s ego made what would arguably be a fatal mistake completely undermining Lowe’s position and inadvertently gave the whole game away that everything this “appeasement department” had done in the past two days was an utter and complete sham and fraud designed to solely to insult, anger, and ultimately frustrate their customer.

He starts reading off the notes for the installation crew which noted only the water coming from the spigot from the disconnected hose and that they’d advised that a plumber would be required to mend it before the installation could proceed.

That much is true and I will at least stipulate to that however the full context and totality of the circumstances is critical to understanding what truly happened.

But nowhere in his narrative was the fact that the professional four of their employees had essentially demanded come on a Saturday afternoon had come to a professional opinion that the installer had never engaged the shutoff valve and that the shutoff valves were not only functioning correctly at that moment, they had always been functioning correctly.

We’ve got the pictures that show what state the shut-off valve was in prior to Miguel’s inspection as well as the pictures of the valve properly closed and no water coming out. There was absolutely nothing done to that valve other than to move it to the CLOSED position.

In fact, there was no acknowledgement whatsoever that anything I’d written or said was provided in the “upper management” review.

So of course if “management” and “upper-management” only has the first installer’s notes to go by (and those were written in such a way to deflect blame and accountability from himself) and completely ignores the copious amounts of evidence that has been provided by me all along during this utterly dreadful “process” that clearly shows that Lowe’s is 100% at fault for the failed installation attempt and all of the misery that has come afterward, then I can see how they might see that number as sufficient.

But after asking several “people in the street” who got the full story of what went on, they’re uniformly of the opinion that Lowe’s is completely at fault and they should correct that by meeting the number I proposed and just being done with it.

So based on Joe’s own admission, I’m not at all convinced that “management” and “upper-management” has gotten the full story or if they have, then they’re choosing to willfully ignore it in hopes that I will just give up and accept their insulting offer and that’s an even worse look for them!

In fact, Joe was very quick to point out that Lowe’s is going to put a letter in the post basically stating that and I had 72 hours to accept or decline the offer.

Well bully for you, Joe. You just go right ahead and do that and blow some postage memorialising on paper the fact that based on the evidence presented and Lowe’s pathetic official response, Lowe’s will have completely lost the plot of what it truly means to be a North Carolina corporation operating in North Carolina theoretically serving North Carolinians.

It just serves as yet more evidence as if there weren’t tonnes of it to begin with that a corporation that founded in this state that once exhibited the qualities in fairness and honest dealing that North Carolinians have taken pride in for centuries such that we would go out of our way to give them our business as a trusted neighbour we were proud of has fallen far away from that ideal in so short a time in the last ten years or so largely based on short-sighted and anti-consumer decisions and policies.

It won’t take me that long to give that missive the attention and response it deserves.

Frankly, it’ll take even less time for me to be absolutely convinced by your words, your actions, and your complete disregard for even the most fundamental canons of “customer service” that you are clearly unsuitable for the role you have and that you should never be allowed to have public interactions with other people where you feel emboldened to flex whatever little authority you perceive yourself to have in an attempt to intimidate and cause emotional harm and distress to the other party.

But if you think this is going to end there just because you’ve pronounced your sentence upon me, that’s the end of it as far as you are concerned, and you feel I’ve got no avenues of appeal or opportunities for further action, you have critically misjudged this situation if not reality.

You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

Obi-Wan Kenobi — “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”

It may well come to pass that Joe might well get what he thinks he wants out of this situation. I can’t in good conscience completely rule out that possibility.

But I suspect he may well find that *HAVING* isn’t quite as wonderful thing as *WANTING*.

I’ve tried to offer a much less painful alternative all along but Lowe’s doesn’t seem to want to participate meaningfully in coming to a mutually beneficial solution that will allow us to learn what lessons need to be learnt and hopefully have better interactions down the road.

Lowe’s has all the power to decide when the pain of trying to defend the utterly indefensible is enough.

It’s time for Lowe’s to make far better decisions and trying to go cheap on settling this dispute isn’t going to stop me from sharing my opinion of their behaviour to anyone that asks and perhaps even volunteer it to those in need of appliances even if they don’t.

After all, don’t they deserve to be aware of the ideas of honour and fair dealing of the company they’re potentially doing business with?

Right now, the story isn’t looking so hot for Lowe’s, in my opinion. Whatever moral high ground you may have thought you had in this interaction (which arguably wasn’t much if any) has been completely compromised and eroded by many of the actions of your employees in the intervening days.

So even if Joe somehow scores a tactical victory with his insulting settlement, the longer I don’t have the capability to conclude this story with a real happy ending to provide some measure of balance to the narrative only serves Lowe’s ill rather than good.

As long as I have the truth and the strong power of words on my side, Lowe’s truly will not win as long as the matter is left improperly settled.

Lowe’s needs to make better decisions and that right soon. Time is of the essence…