If you go to the home depot page for torque wrenches and click the filter for drive size, you get this list:

  1/2 in
  1/4 in
  1 in
  3/8 in
  3/4 in
  Specialty

  0.5
  0.25
  1
  0.375
  0.75

Or when the site tells you your store doesn't have a part in stock, but neglects to tell you that they do have 350 of the identical part, different brand, in stock. Because who would ever buy a 1/2-inch close Halex rigid conduit close nipple in-store right now when they could wait a few days for a 1/2-inch close Commercial Electric rigid conduit nipple?

I feel like the home depot website is fine. It's a lot better than most other shops, I've had a good experience finding the aisle and location of items, and it's generally accurate with the amount in stock at each location. If you didn't enable precise location or have bad cell signal then that is hardly the fault of the website.

+1

also, when I'm in my local store it seems like cell connection goes to shit for some reason and then I have to jump on their in store wifi in order to search their website

Indeed, Home Depot's software is generally so bad. I remember around 2017/2018 time frame when they started showing up to big tech conferences (especially K8s and React.js conferences) really trying to modernize. I spent a few minutes talking to the people manning the booth (which were surprisingly high ranking in the company, at least by title), and came away thinking "I'm glad you're making an effort, but y'all really have no idea what you're doing." The left hand and the right hand had completely different ideas/priorities about how to accomplish their goals. I didn't want to make any judgments on a simple conversation at a conference, but at this point I think time has shown that it was pretty representative of how they were approaching it internally, and unsurprisingly it did not work out super well.

Now that said, I don't want to minimize the difficulty in modernizing software at a corp like HD. It's wildly more difficult than most people can appreciate. I've consulted for companies trying to do it, and there are lots of challenges with legacy systems, migrations, and plenty of non-technical challenges as well.

Shout out to Wal-mart for genuinely kicking ass at this though. I'm quickly becoming an Onn fanboy. Genearlly speaking, great products at great prices, from their USB cables up to their smart speakers and more. You can really tell from the product design and implementation that they are letting the nerds geek out and have fun! That in turn enables me to do the same :-)

I've never had an employee know what a tool is, much less where to find it. All they're doing is doing this process on a slower, ruggedized phone.

I literally watched someone Google "masonry bit" right in front of me.

Thanks for reminding me to uninstall that godawful app, which is like their website, but somehow even slower/clunkier.

> the "current store" now points to a random location somewhere in a different state

I thought that was just me. It gets the first, maybe the second digit of the zip code right and that's about it.

Jokes on you, all the employees do is use their mobile site as well.

I literally couldn't load their website with my previous Pixel phone. The performance was so terrible it would grind to a halt and freeze or crash.

Someone made their own version of the HD app that works much better:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/1opufvq/a_lightweigh...

Its hard to locate anything in their stores these days and its even harder to find any staff. So what I do is order for pickup and let them do the work.

Not as bad as Costco. Their app and website are still stuck in 90s.

Someone should use their GH token to fix their website

I think the same people/platform made the Best Buy mobile website, they look very similar. Just absolutely atrocious design. It's slow, the UI elements bounce all over the place, it forgets your selections, and godspeed if for whatever reason you need to refresh the page because something chose not to render. That's outside of the store on a good connection. Doing this IN the store is a whole new level of hair pulling frustration.

Also I once asked an employee for help locating an item and they told me to pull up the app. I was like "you pull up the app", and we sat there for 5 minutes waiting for things to load until he decided he'll just help me locate the item lol

Exactly, their site and apps are trash.