Harbor Freight — Local services in Oroville

Harbor Freight is not my usual source for tools. Three times in fifty years I've set up a professional woodworking shop without any access to HB. But I have found them a handy, low cost supplier of basics.

So when, in the middle of my current photography road trip, my tweezers went AWOL, with my fat fingers unable to extract the SD card from my Sony a6309, I was lucky to stumble on Harbor Freight in Oroville, California.

Wow! It's a big store with wide, clean isles; long shelves neatly stocked in logical sections with a wide inventory; and, of course, a handful of items for which I was not shipping but which I suddenly needed.

A short-handed shovel, for instance. I travel widely in California back country in search of photographic images. Often my Sprinter RV and I am in the midst of highly flammable forest. So I should have always been carrying a shovel to stub out a spark from the vehicle, to dig out a wheel stick against a rock, to - oh, I don',t know. But that yellow fiberglas handle makes me look prepared.

Harbor Freight, especially this one in Oroville, is the kind of place where you can not only find the one missing metric deep socket but fulfill bits of your hard hat fantasies without...

Nice clean store but trying to check out was not as nice. I saw three people who worked there. One of them was helping another customer but the other two just ignored people trying to check out. I finally said "I guess the stuff is free since no one wants to take our money" to my husband, but loud enough for the cashiers standing there ignoring us to hear. Other customers laughed. The cashier who was already helping a customer looked up then and called for another checker. He saw the woman cashier ( the other guy left ) and asked her to help customers. She mumbled something and walked very slowly to help us. She really acted as if we were a bother instead of customers. I hope that was just a bad day and...

Seriously one of harbor freight's best stores I've ever been to. The staff was super friendly and helpful and as always they had everything I was looking for for a crazy cheap price. The stores quality just seems to be getting better and better year after year. Everyone knows harbor freights reputation for cheap tools but I recently purchased one of their 12,000 lb Badlands synthetic braid wnches and have been absolutely blown away with the capabilities and reliability that this thing offers. Aside from that they've got a killer selection of replacement parts and accessories. I picked up some oversized shackles and a soft shackle while I was there as well. Couldn't be...