The Lowes Down

I just bought a grill.
I love grilling and with all the warm weather - and a fantastic deck where I live, it's time.

I researched and then chose this Weber 22.5" One-Touch Silver Charcoal Grill and some accessories.

I have some preferences when it comes to hardware stores, but I wanted to make sure I gave myself the best experience.

I called a local hardware store to get their prices on my grill and items. They did their best to help me, but didn't make a list and kept putting the phone down to go find individual items and I had to keep a running total of their prices. It was OK, but not the best experience ever. They didn't have exactly what I wanted either, so that wasn't great. After that, I did everything online as you might expect. I used the websites of the following stores in this order of preference.

• Weber
• Sears
• Home Depot
• Ace
• True Value
• Lowes

Imagine my surprise when Lowes got my business! With that, here are three good things about using the Lowes website that the others couldn't touch. One note, the Weber site was pretty good, but the prices were too high and they didn't have everything I wanted.

2) Add to Cart and Continue Shopping The toughest part about all those other stores was trying to find the things I wanted, add them to my cart and then keep going. Home Depot wanted me to create an account every time I added something to my cart and I eventually just stopped using the site. Lowes didn't ask me about an account until I was ready to check out. I still didn't do it, but they were polite.

3) Pick up at my Local Store This was absolutely killer at Lowes. First, their detection software correctly placed me after I gave them my zip code. The other stores were either wrong or did an auto-detect that placed me several towns away where my internet provider's offices are. Once I set my local Lowes store and told them that I was picking things up there, they didn't show me things that were not available at that store. The others were all over the place - showing me things and even letting me add them to my cart before showing me that they were out of stock or only available online.

1) Fast I know it's good to be patient, but I work on these here interwebz all day. The speed of the site is important, and the Lowes site rocked it. Additionally, they offer 20 minute pickup of my order. So, I placed the order and printed my pick-up claim, and within 20 minutes they called me to tell me that my order was waiting for me at the customer service desk.

Lowes - you surprised me! Nice going!

PS - Lowes has guest Wifi. I used it to add this note.