I’m pricing out a new garage door. Two options. First is a local small town company, I’ve seen they’re van.
second option is a Costco installer from the big city about an hour away.
both are the same price, about 3k. Costco however comes with a 300 gift card.
I think the local guy, no?
Yeah, for sure the local guy.
+1 for “local guy”
Local guy. He should care more about the work. He is counting on your positive word-of-mouth to survive. Costco guy is counting on Costco work to survive.
And you SHOULD give that positive word-of-mouth if it is deserved. Ask him if he has a sign that you can put up on your lawn to show off who did your garage door work.
I don’t live in a small town, so I generally do not practice what I preach. But I steer clear of big-box contracted work, because I do not want a bunch of material in my garage waiting for the work to show up. These things are not well-coordinated. Local guy is going to bring the materials AND the help at the same time (I expect).
Yep. It’s Jeremie, owner and the guy doing the work. He lives in town, he’s probably one of what I call ‘The Related’. There’s only three last names in our phone book, he’s probably got one of those. And yes, the benefit is, less chance of getting screwed - because if you live here and do that, then they know someone that knows you, and when I go asking about you, I’ll know someone as well. You can’t hide screwing people over when the town’s not big enough to disappear in.
Curiously, my last name is one of the very common last names in this town - there’s two variations of spelling it, and mine’s not the same as either of them. People will ask ‘with a c or a k’ and my response is ‘neither, I’m not related to any of you guys’.
tl;dr I don’t need Google reviews. I can just call Kim and ask her. She’ll know all about them.
This. If something goes wrong, I’m not saying the Costco shop wouldn’t make it right, but you’re dealing with corporate. If Jeremie installs it and something is off, you just call him back and he’s there same day.
We had Home Depot install our oven replacement and then were away for a week and my MIL checked on the house, smelt gas, utility came out, confirmed gas, installed incorrectly and could have burnt house down. Not doing that again.
I hope you got some money from Home Depot for that one.
I would have been livid with them.
Is the local small town company an actual small company? The big local shops here have a few hundred employees and my experience with them has been mixed. I needed a new water heater and they would not give me a ballpark estimate over the phone to replace it “its a $70 fee to have a tech look at it and you can apply that to the repair”…ok so the tech shows up, looks at it for 3 minutes, and hands me a bill for $200 because there was a diagnostic fee they never mentioned (the company advertises transparency as their #1). They were $300 more on the replacement and wouldn’t budge so I just ate the cost and went with the next guy that didn’t piss me off with this shit.
When I subcontracted out my basement finish, the actual local brothers were awesome, the electrician was a friend who sent over his new trainee, and the plumber that one of them suggested was an asshole.
These are all hit or miss and I am not sure why the Costco guy is expected to be any worse when any of them could live down the street. My local guys (that helped with the basement) do great work but are a bit of a disorganized mess. The ones that can get their shit together stop doing the actual work once they build up a big enough crew.