I am hours away from getting confirmation that my order is going through....!! I spoke to the HD guy at my store yesterday afternoon and he said he had to check the system to see if the shipment had left yet. Although I will believe it when I see it, I hopefully will have a pallet coming to my store in Madison in the next week.
Yes, it did involve calls to multiple people in the same department, talking to store managers and smooth talkking out of my ars! Not so much on HD on this end, but mainly the store that I have been working with that had it....They seem to be catching on with how popular this stuff is and are getting grumpy when other stores want it. The quote from the store manager was " we ordered this for the people in our area and we are turning out to be a distribution center and I don't like it, but I will help you out this time"
I think the key is to find a store that has it that no one has approached them to do it. Ask for the outdoor garden IMA or garden manager. Then, if they show opposition, either try another manager, go above that person, or try another store. More than likely the store manager has put the clamps down on shipping this stuff out because they know they can sell it at their store. The biggest thing is that if they do show opposition, ask them why...I did that and the person said that their store had done it before and got stuck with paying freight and basically it cost them money to ship it instead of getting profit. Offer to pay the freight...with the amount of bags you get, the freight only works out to be something like $3-4/bag...compare that to the $30-40/bag for just getting one bag at LFS! Not bad.
All in all, I think eventually with all this demand for these bags, and I only see it getting larger, HD and Old Castle will figure out a way to get it shipped to other stores. It only makes sense.
In fact, Old Castle told me that they would ship it to Wisconsin, but that they needed to order a full truckload...who knows how many bags that is, but large areas like Milwaukee, Minneapolis, even out west, there has to be demand for this stuff. If a bright HD store manager were to figure this out and get one shipped and figure out a way to get it to other stores in his area, I think they would do well....Of course, who knows what depth the politics go!
Good Luck!
Guytano
