Washing Machine Advice

[bobc455]

One more point about buying appliances.

Stores like Home Depot tend to cheap stuff down as much as possible. Don't expect a quality appliance from Home Depot.

One example: Several years ago I bought a snowblower from HD. It was the popular orange machine, so I figured it would be a quality product. Turns out that the manufacturer makes a "special" version of the machine for HD, with different parts. In fact my local snowblower repair store would not service my model (even though they sold/serviced that same brand) because it had different parts. And of course trying to get HD to do minor repairs is a joke, they can only "send it out". In that case, I should have spent the extra $200 to buy the "real" version locally (which never would have broke to begin with).

Second example: I had a tenant for several years who installed flooring. He was the kind of guy who had a great price and was very stubborn about quality (and as you can imagine, cheap and good flooring guys don't have a lot of money leftover for themselves but that is another story). He explained to me that if you bought flooring tiles from HD, although they looked & felt similar to ones from a "standard" or "premium" flooring store in fact they were different - the "barely within spec" tiles went to HD, and the best ones went to "real" flooring stores. For example, when a product line starts up, it takes a while for a product to be within spec, and HD would typically get the first batch of "barely within spec" tiles. This would lead to slight color and size variations in the tiles, instead of good uniformity across the whole floor.

I'm not trying to bash HD - they have good prices, but you also have to understand their business model. Another substantiation of "you get what you pay for"...

-BC