10 Things People Hate About Shopping At Home Depot

With Home Depot having more than 2,300 stores across America and serving millions of customers each year, it's only natural that there will be some slip-ups here and there. At this scale, even a single-digit failure rate will result in hundreds, if not thousands, of irate customers. To that end, we've gone through and collected the most common issues that customers have come across when shopping at Home Depot stores. 

What we found was a collection of problems ranging from issues with installations, late order fulfilment, refunds, returns, and the company's price-matching policy, along with poor customer service on many occasions. All of the issues have been reported by multiple Home Depot customers that have left reviews after December 2025, and they're not localized to a particular store, city, region, or state. Moreover, we've aggregated this feedback across no less than five different review websites, as well as from online forums; all the problems that Home Depot customers face seem to be recurring ones that point to supply chain issues, network design, and delivery partner challenges. 

Please note that the list is in no particular order, nor does this indicate that these issues affect the majority of shoppers — simply that they're common pain points across Home Depot locations. With all that said, Home Depot is making lots of changes in 2026; hopes are high that some of these issues will get sorted out.

Home Depot's returns are rather hit or miss. It's true that they do have generous return timelines; they offer 48 hours for major appliances, a week for air conditioners, generators, dehumidifiers, and pressure washers, and a 30-day return for most other items. There are also specific cases where a 90-day return is accepted. Additionally, for buyers who used a Home Depot credit card or commercial account, there is a 365-day return window. Note that this last timeline does not override the smaller windows for appliances that we outlined above, in addition to which there can be specific return exceptions that can change from time to time. 

With all that said, there have been a number of customers who have expressed frustration with the Home Depot returns policy — specifically with returns not being honored within this timeline. Another recurring theme seems to be that certain individual stores do not inform customers properly about these specific return windows, which leads to frustration when they try to return a product, especially when the actual return window would have just passed.

In another case, a customer did get a refund for a wrong product that was delivered, but did not get any sort of credit for the delivery fees they had to pay on that product. Other customers do report that the overall return experience at Home Depot is frustrating, and is a process that takes more time than it should. All of this makes missing the return window one of the most common mistakes people make when shopping at Home Depot.

When you operate a massive big-box store chain the size of Home Depot, it's expected that things will go wrong occasionally. When this happens, a well-trained, helpful team can help customers deal with these issues as and when they do crop up. With Home Depot, however, a great many customers have taken to online forums to share their poor customer service experiences. Buyers report issues with finding help when in a brick-and-mortar location, dealing with unhelpful workers when there is someone around, and general issues with understaffed locations. The issues only compound with the online store, with buyers unable to reach customer service agents, dealing with technical glitches on the website, and having no clear resolution for faulty purchases that didn't match the online listing. 

All of these issues are in addition to a recurring theme of the company's customer service agents being hard to reach in general. Many buyers report long hold times over the phone regardless of whether they managed to speak to a human employee. There also seems to be a repeating sentiment amongst reviewers that customer service agents are not sufficiently familiar with Home Depot's policies themselves, which leads to further frustration for the buyer. Lastly, customers have reported being unable to escalate their issue to management when requesting it.

Possibly the most common issue that customers complain about when it comes to Home Depot is that of inaccurate delivery timelines. Many buyers report that even though they placed their orders on time, packages arrive late — or even not at all. And it's not just about lateness either; a great many buyers have found their packages were delivered ahead of schedule. While that may not sound like an inconvenience, not everyone has people at home who will be free to take or handle deliveries that have not been planned in advance, especially for big appliances or large orders of building materials. 

Another issue that Home Depot customers face with respect to deliveries is that the products can be dropped off without any intimation or update being sent to the customer. As we've already covered, the returns process is fraught with issues; the refund process can also be a hassle, as we'll get into below.

It's important to remember that big retail stores like Home Depot will often use third-party delivery vendors for their so-called "last mile" fulfilment; as such, the blame isn't entirely on the chain themselves. However, there is a lot that Home Depot can do to improve the situation — chief of which would be having stricter partner criteria and improving the customer service situation we've mentioned above.

When Home Depot products do finally show up at your doorstep, there is a non-zero chance (as with all businesses) that they will not be in the best shape. However, many customers report that their ordered items arrive damaged, many times in a state beyond repair. There are also fulfilment issues, where the wrong model of a product, or even the wrong product entirely, have been delivered to the customer — which defeats the point of placing an online order in the first place. 

Meanwhile, when a customer has to initiate a return or refund, they are met with more hurdles — an experience that could be further compounded if the buyer gets a customer service agent who doesn't appreciate their urgency or understand their own store policies, which is also something that can happen. Now, Home Depot does have its merits — for example, some of their products do still beat Harbor Freight on both quality and price — but buyers should be aware that getting a wrong or damaged item is still a possibility.

Many Home Depot customers choose the (supposed) convenience of having appliances home delivered as opposed to lugging them back from the store themselves. A key part of this process is that the installation of these large appliances can taken care of by the delivery partner if the buyer pays for that option. Home Depot recommends that its customers do a couple steps before the installation and delivery, such as measuring out the appliance and prepping the area where it's to be installed. However, many buyers find that even after all that prep, Home Depot's installers do a shoddy job, or that they downright fail to to the job at all. 

Some buyers also report struggles in getting replacements for items that malfunctioned as a result of poor installation, owing to the return window being closed for that item. It's also worth mentioning that Home Depot offers installations (most often through their partner network) of other items like flooring, carpeting, and more; users report similar problems with these installs as well. 

As an offshoot of the deliveries not being sent out on time, which we described above, buyers would sometimes pay extra for installation services, but then the appliance wouldn't be delivered, or be delivered damaged. However, damaged or missing appliance or not, the installation crew still end up being paid. As a result, one of the overarching review themes that we ran into online was that buyers should avoid purchasing a number of appliances from Home Depot, if possible.

We've established that Home Depot can leave buyers holding damaged items on delivery. This could come about through any combination of delivery negligence, improper packing, rough handling in transit, shoddy installation work, or just rotten luck. However, given the generous return policy that Home Depot has, fixing this should be as easy as creating a return request, sending the item back, and obtaining a replacement, right? Unfortunately, customers also report issues with many aspects of the replacement process at Home Depot. 

In some cases, customers have been denied replacements for their products that should have been covered under Home Depot's own policies. There have also been situations where a customer has had to pay out of pocket to replace a faulty item before they would be issued a credit to their payment method for the first defective item. At times, customers have been left high and dry without a replacement or even a refund for an extended time despite the claimed fault lying with Home Depot, such as in the case of damage from a bad install not discovered until after the return window passed. From a legal standpoint, there's a good chance that Home Depot is in the right in these situations, owing to the fine print and such technicalities, but it does leave a bad taste in the mouths of customers who experience something like this.

When there's no other recourse, buyers often believe (and rightly so) that they have the fail-safe option of requesting a refund for a product that they have purchased. When it comes to Home Depot, though, there have been cases where refunds for damaged or defective products have been processed but have then been delayed in being issued. There have also been problems with getting the refunds approved in the first place for certain buyers, and the issue of the return/refund window having passed by keeps cropping up here as well. 

What's more, as we described earlier, it might take longer than the usual channels for credit card customers when requesting a refund. Additionally, compensation will usually not be offered for any time lost as a result. There have also been sporadic reports of customers not receiving their ordered item but still having their payment methods charged and no compensation, credit, or refunds being issued.

This seems to be another case of communication to the customer not being at the level it should. There have been a few buyers who have expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that Home Depot claims to match prices but then refuses to honor the customer's claim. There are two big caveats that we should point out here — first, that Home Depot treats their online and offline stores as different entities, meaning that they won't price match between the two. Further, Home Depot also won't price match products that are on clearance, on sale, or that have their price altered due to any other type of promotion. Additionally, Home Depot will not honor price match claims where the lower price is from a store with membership pricing, such as Sam's Club or Costco. 

All of these facts might not be immediately clear to a customer unless one digs deep into Home Depot's terms and conditions. It's easy to see how this could lead to frustration from customers who think that they would be in the right, having found the same product for cheaper but wanting to give their loyalty to Home Depot. Readers should also note that, other than the online-offline price disparity we've mentioned before, Home Depot's curbside prices do differ from its in-store ones, sometimes significantly. For the uninitiated, a "curbside" pickup simply means ordering online, but picking it up yourself. This means there can be price differences between buying it off the shelf and doing a curbside pickup — something to be aware of.

Home Depot sells products both through brick-and-mortar offline stores as well as online through its website. To make things easier for the consumer, the retailer allows for a "pickup from store" option for those who buy something online but want to collect it themselves. As such, one of the built-in features on the Home Depot website is being able to see if a particular item that you're looking at is available in stock at a location near you. 

Unfortunately, customers who make use of this feature have reported that when they've arrived at the offline store, the item that was clearly marked as available on the website is actually out of stock at the brick-and-mortar location. This could be due to a number of factors; we're assuming the most likely reason is that that the item would have been shipped to the store from a nearby warehouse by a certain date or time, provided the customer had ordered it. 

The issue might lie in the fact that customers see that an item is available for pickup in a store and then show up expectantly without actually placing the online order. Again, this is just speculation on our part, but it would be Home Depot's responsibility to make this clear to the buyer. If you're a prospective customer, you can likely mitigate this situation to some degree if you call your local Home Depot branch before setting out and ask whether the item you saw online is currently in stock.

Another pain point that a great many of Home Depot's customers report is with regards to the warranties on items purchased from the chain. As a home improvement-focused business, it's understandable that customers can spend thousands of dollars (or even more) on a Home Depot trip. As such, many of these high-value, high-ticket items come with some sort of warranty, be it for electronics, flooring, carpeting, house fixtures, or something similar. However, issues begin to crop up when customers need to avail themselves of this warranty, with plenty of complaints coming in about them not being honored, being selectively honored, or refused on a technicality. 

Furthermore, there have also been reports that sometimes Home Depot lets customers keep damaged items by offering them a discount, but neglects to inform those customers that doing so voids the warranty. Additionally, Home Depot offers an extended protection plan that lasts beyond the manufacturer's warranty for an extra cost, but this extended warranty also has rather poor reviews from customers. Users should note that it seems that Home Depot will not honor its on extended warranty as long as the manufacturer's warranty is active. The last thing we've found is that even if Home Depot agrees that you're covered under its warranty, actually getting an appointment with the technician or handyman can also be quite troublesome, with long waiting times.

To begin with, we took a careful look at all of Home Depot's policies, including warranties, returns, refunds, and more. We then moved onto trusted third-party review sites, including Consumer Affairs, Trustpilot, and Google Reviews. After that, we moved onto looking at online user forums, investigating what people had said about their own Home Depot experiences. The data we got was clear; on the majority of websites that we checked at the time of writing, there was an overwhelming number  of one-star reviews. Now, it might be true that customers with a positive experience are less likely to leave a review, but the Home Depot data we found was skewed quite a bit towards the negative side of things. 

We combed through these listings, filtering by number of stars and searching with specific keywords. We also sorted the results by date, preferring to use only those reviews which were published after December 2025. In some cases, we did look at older reviews, but we did find enough recent data to get a fair idea of what customers at Home Depot struggle with the most. Lastly, we'd like readers to note that we tried to prioritize customers who had a "verified purchase" (or similar) tag associated with their review, but this was not always possible; therefore, some of the reviews we used came from self-identified customers of Home Depot.