Hassett Ace Hardware — Local services in Palo Alto

The location of this place makes the store a bit of a monopoly for most of Palo alto, Stanford, and surrounding communities, or at least for those of us whose main transportation is not a car.

This factor magnifies any of the customer-unfriendly decisions and policies this store may take, and not price matching their own online listings is one of these decisions.

I headed to the store to buy a specific item that they had in stock at a slightly higher price than Home Depot. I chose to ride my scooter instead of driving my car to the slightly farther away Home Depot, because environment.

However, when I got to Ace, I saw that their in-store price was higher than online, and quite a bit more expensive than the Home Depot listing. I asked the staff to price match their own website, but they refused. Which made me order the item I needed online just to pick it up right back there a few minutes later.

Such an asinine rule serves only to be inconvenient for the customer, and doesn't save anybody any money or time. Get...

I keep coming back to this Ace Hardware for the customer service. Today I put my garage door opener through the wash, and made a couple of trips to Ace trying to figure out what kind of new remote would work with my garage door. Turns out that this shop doesn't stock one that will work (my opener is rather old), but Mike F. really went above and beyond helping me to figure this out, even going so far as to test the 9V battery I put into my old opener to make sure it was the opener that was causing the problem.

You just can't beat that kind of...

This place is really great. I've spent many hours of my life standing in the aisles of a Home Depot or OSH, pondering to myself whether some random tool or part would work for my project, and having discovered this local hardware store, I realized that it doesn't have to be like that. Their staff is extremely knowledgable and helpful, and they help you find solutions to problems. You don't have to hunt them down like Pokemon, they come and find you, and ask how they can help. How novel. The more I go here, the less pleasant I...