Rona Home Centre

Interesting visit to Rona this weekend.
My bf was in the market for some chain to secure his kettlebells from theft at the gym where he teaches. He settled instead on some wire rope which was both cheaper and less easily cut by thieves. Great idea right? Sort of.
We found out firsthand just how tough that stuff is and proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes trying to cut through it with a small pair of clippers handed to us by the woman working in the department. She didn’t know how to cut it, stated they had nothing else to cut it with anyway and was none too professional or helpful in this process. We asked if they had a saw, and she said no. Sure, it was a pain in the butt, but if a store is selling the product, they should probably have the tools with which to deal with it. Not her fault but silly nonetheless.
When asked about crimping the ends of the wire rope, she stated flatly we need a crimping tool and they are expensive, and she did not confirm that we could have it crimped at the store. Again, way to be prepared, Rona.
Fortunately, a man in the department was kind enough to help us out with the crimping and spent a painful half hour doing so. Though it took some prompting on my bf’s part to consider using a saw which hastened this painful process exponentially. Hmm… They DID have a saw, after all.
An hour later, we were about to pay. The girl at the till was seemingly clueless as to what to ring in, and could not for the life of her sort out what we were trying to purchase. Perhaps we weren’t communicating clearly, but it didn’t seem like rocket science to ring in one piece of wire rope with 2 end crimpers. In fact, I felt like we were dealing with Snooky.
I think we will head to the Rona in East Van from now on. That’s an hour of my life I will never get back.

This place is a hit or miss in terms of customer service but it does have some people who are actually decently helpful, and its got pretty much everything you’d want from a hardware store.
Look for the nice asian man in the power tools section, he is by far the most helpful. Most of the younger guys who work here really don’t give a crap about customer service.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… This pretty much sums up my experience with Rona this weekend. Let’s start with the happy part of this review. Five stars for the buy 2 boxes of laminate flooring, get 1 box free sale. Thanks to Rona’s already low prices plus the sale, I saved 60% off of what I was expecting to pay at Home Depot or any of the other local flooring places. However, to get the flooring that I wanted involved traveling back and forth between the North Van Rona and the one in Vancouver twice. Here’s where the review gets ugly. Zero stars for customer service. The North Van store didn’t have enough of the flooring and after trying to hunt down a sales person to help us for over a half hour, it was suggested that we go over to the Vancouver store because they definitely had 100 boxes. We drove over Second Narrows and arrived at the Vancouver store. They didn’t have the flooring that we wanted on display. We didn’t think to write the model number down (Doh!) and the sales guys at the Vancouver store weren’t willing to search around for us or call the other store for the info. Fine. We called Rona in North Van to see if they could help. Two phone calls and 40 minutes later, we were still on hold and decided to just DRIVE BACK TO THE RONA IN NORTH VAN BECAUSE IT WOULD BE FASTER THAN WAITING ON HOLD INDEFINITELY. We got over to the North Van store and got the model info. Then we hopped back in the car and drove to the Vancouver store for the second time to purchase the flooring and arrange for delivery. The whole experience took a good 6 hours.
Was it one of the most annoying shopping experiences of my life? Yes! Was it worth saving a thousand bucks? Yeah. I was tempted to just give up on Rona and head over to Home Depot to save my sanity, but in the end I just couldn’t see paying another place that much more money out of spite.
So, yes, Rona has great prices. Unfortunately, Rona also has almost nonexistent customer service. If you can live with that, you know where to go.