You’re buying $117 of lumber. Your buddy offers you a pencil to mark some of the wood. You mark it and begin to walk out of the store. Just then, security comes running out. You absentmindedly pocketed the used pencil – a $0.41 mistake.
Home Depot’s cost? Banning you from their stores for one year.
This seems to be causing a fuss up in New England. Come on… who hasn’t asked to borrow a pencil/pen, used it, get busy with something else, then remember you still had the pen? Granted, you return the pen, but just a tap on the shoulder and a “hey buddy, you still have that pencil?” clears things up nicely, yes?
Especially if you’re buying $117 of lumber. Petty shoplifting is one thing. A paying customer? Geez…
It’s understandable for a company to want to protect itself against shoplifting. In some shops with high-value items, it’s not uncommon to see armed security guards but this is when we are talking about diamond necklaces, or gold watches, not pencils!
Of course, a *great* public relations gimmick by Home Depot would be to come up with orange carpenter pencils with the Home Depot logo on them and hand the pencils out free with every purchase. So it might cost $100,000 or so for a month or two, but it’s a neat gimmick that would certainly recover any loss in sales from a public who might rather do business elsewhere until they forget about it.
I doubt this small incident will stop people from shopping at Home Depot. After all, it is America’s largest home improvement retailer, and with the variety of coupons and promo codes available online on Raise, people would be stupid to not take up this offer. This incident is definitely confusing and shouldn’t happen again, but is a petty reason to tarnish Home Depot’s name.