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.
