The real problem is when there's no employees available to open the cabinet. I'm sorry, Home Depot, but I'm not going to run around the store trying to find someone only to have them call someone else just so I can get a $50 roll of copper wire.
Not to mention that in some locations there's so few employees, you'll end up walking a mile before someone says, "I'll have someone meet you there." Then no one shows up.
I went to Seattle for a tech conference. The supermarkets are crazy depressing. There was like 5 staff members, a Spanish lady with a cast on her leg, two kids under 20, a really big guy at the bakery isle, and a 25 yo woman who was stocking and managing a cash register.
There was also a bunch of weirdos outside and not a security guard in sight.
Then a mile or two away are million dollar housesn and billion dollar tech companies.
Except when they accost you to do that stupid fucking survey and just dive right in without your consent. Boy, they find you then... When deciding between Lowe's and Home Depot, I lean toward going to Lowe's simply because of that bullshit.
My daughter loves Five Below. Last time I went there, they forced me to rate my shopping experience between 1 and 10 in order to finish checking out. I did 5 because fuck their statistics.
The third-party sales people trying to scam you into a new AC are the best. My go-to is "Sorry, you'd have to ask my landlord." I haven't had a landlord in years.
Once at a store the person wearing a DirectTV shirt said "what do you use for TV service?" I just said "we have lots of DVDs we don't watch" he didn't even try to continue the sales pitch
It's ridiculous. I had the same issue for a 50ft roll of 14 gauge romex. Not even the good 10/3 stuff. This was bottom-of-the-barrel 14/2. I was then able to walk over and grab a $100 cable tester and a box of CAT6 right off the shelf.
I guess crackheads aren't stealing cable testers or ethernet cable.
"Romex" is a brand name for a type of non-metallic (NM) insulated wire. It's pretty much the standard for 95% of the wire that's run in a typical house in North America, and kind of looks like a big flat extension cable. There's an external plastic sheath that holds all the wires together (that's the non-metallic part, as opposed to say, running it in metal conduit), and then each wire inside is also insulated, aside from the ground conductor. When you see something like 12/2 or 10/3, that's the wire gauge (12 or 10 gauge) and then the number of current carrying conductors on the inside (2 or 3, plus a ground).