Islands Ace Hardware — Local services in Wilmington Island

I’m a painter, and I go to this store to buy Ben paint when I’m on the islands. There is one man who works at the paint counter who questions every request I have. He has even gone as far as telling my clients to buy the wrong paint, because he doesn’t agree with what I’ve told them to get. As a result, the client had to return and buy the correct paint. In addition to paying for two cans of Ben paint, they had to pay me to repaint the entire room! Today the counter guy debated me again, mansplaining his reasons for arguing with me. I finally called the manager today. I gave him details of past visits, and told him this had become a problem. Chad, the manager, explained that the man has 15 years of experience working at Home Depot and Ace paint counters, and he was just trying to be helpful. He implied I was overreacting. I told Chad that I’d been painting for 40 years, and not working behind a counter at Ace. Talking to Chad was almost worse than the bad experience with the counter guy. It became crystal clear that the employees at Ace are always right, and the customers need to accept that. Never heard I’m sorry, but I did hear...

If you are going to Blatantly racially profile your customers. At least have the ability to be good at it. Watching me intensely and sending a store clerk directly to me.. where he's standing less than 2 inches from me and gets right in my face. It was so blatant he didn't even say may I help you? He said what are you looking for? all while holding his radio and taking orders from his masters. The whole experience is pretty outrageous. Pretty gross situation. I totally hate coming to the store. The store has a history of mistreating certain Customers. But I will be putting a word out this time.. how can they improve? The first step would be if they are going to profile people they should learn the types of things that can help identify someone who has criminal intentions versus a customer looking for marine epoxy. Going on colouring alone is an ignorant and ineffective way to cut down on store crime. Mis-perceiving people’s ethnicity is also a problem and there could be legal issues when it comes to the heavy-handed nature of their profiling. I will never visit this...

Incompetent young men work at this store. One does not know how to ring one bag of soil properly even when provided with pictures and store number code. When asking another to help load said bag, he was unable to communicate choosing to ignore me initially and then when asked again, he gave me a lot of attitude saying he was “kind of busy right now” and proceeded to load another customer’s bags, which was not obvious as he was just moving bags around on top of one another only moving bags to the trunk of another customer’s car once I stood around for a while. I understand young men are still learning about how the world works, but the level of incompetence and stress they caused not only me, but multiple other women at the store (both staff and customers) was out of this world. This whole experience is making me consider not going to this store ever again (even though I live 2 minutes away) because although they have great products, the incompetence of everyone besides the paint staff makes shopping there anxiety inducing and a...