Why is it important to buy your garage door and garage door opener from a garage door company instead of buying it from a superstore? We asked our most experienced technician and here is what he said.
Home Depot, Lowe’s, Sears, Costco, and other superstores offer a great variety of products, brands, and services. They are great places to do one stop shopping. This is a great service when trying to save time with most Americans’ busy schedules. Because of this convenience and the habit of always shopping at the same store, many people believe they should shop there when replacing their garage doors and garage door openers. I’m going to explain to you why this isn’t such a good deal.
When you buy your products at these stores, you are missing out on quality, sales knowledge, and getting a sub-par installation on these products. You typically don’t receive as high of a quality product as you would from an independent garage door company. The doors and openers sold in these stores are usually very standard unless you know about higher quality products that aren’t in stock. And the average buyer doesn’t have this knowledge about garage doors and openers products. Most customers don’t know about these other brands or products of the same brand when they arrive at the store and count on the fact that the salesman will know.
Let’s go over a real life example that is very frustrating to most home owners.
As I mentioned above, superstores don’t specialize in installation and repair services. When you buy a garage door or garage door opener from a superstore, they call the contracted company that deals with installation and repair for these doors. The contracted company doesn’t make any profits on superstores such as Home Depot, so the usually send a low skilled installer. You also pay a full installation price, where if you buy directly from a garage door company, you get a sub-par price for installation. In most cases, these installers do a poor job of installing your garage door, and soon enough you find problems such as noisy garage doors, lop-sided doors, or ones that don’t seal correctly. So you need to fix the problem before your warranty expires.
First, you call Home Depot (or any superstore you bought the product from); they transfer you to the garage door department (after going through multiple phone robots and call attempts). You explain the problem and then they have to find the manager. The manager has to talk to their contracted company. The contracted company then sends out the same low level installer to fix the same problem they created. Remember, this company already sent out their most inexperienced installer because they make no money on Home Depot jobs and really don’t care a whole lot about Home Depot customers. There’s a good chance that they will never really get the problem solved correctly. Customers usually get tired of dealing with these problems after a while and just deal with the noise, a lop-sided door, or a door that doesn’t seal correctly. Then something happens a year or two later when the product’s labor is no longer warrantied and they’re pulling money out of their own pockets. How much did you really save?
This is just one of the problems with buying your garage door products from a mega store. Wouldn’t you rather deal with a specialist that has extensive product knowledge? Wouldn’t you rather have an expert installing you garage door/opener? Wouldn’t you rather talk to an owner who cares about their customers when you have a problem? Of course you would. That’s why you need to call a professional, an expert in their field. You’ll save a lot more of your money, time, and frustration in the long term.
As always, please comment your thoughts, ideas, and questions! Ask us anything and we will be more than happy to answer or write another blog to address your questions.
Yours truly, All 4 Seasons Garage Doors.