kitchen showrooms

[ramtops]

I guess they must be like car showrooms – suffer a lot of people coming in and kicking the cupboards, with no real intention of buying. But we are looking to do our kitchen in the next few months, so we’re gathering ideas and so forth.

There’s a big kitchen showroom down on St Andrews’ Quay here in Hull – not cheap as the sheds, but not outrageously expensive, or so we thought. So we pootled down there this morning to have a look.

They do several grades of kitchen – from 1 through to at least 8, and possibly 12. Nowhere does it give any idea on the displays which price range it might be. The “from £xxx” posters on the wall don’t tell you what you get for the £xxx. So you have to speak to a droid.

We hovered by a desk, where someone was rustling papers in an important manner. “Lets leave him if he’s busy”, I said to Pete, but he put his papers down, and said “I can multitask”. Now, I might be a demanding customer, but I don’t want a salesman to mutlitask when he’s attending to me; I want his full attention.

He asked what appliances we’d need – we told him hob, oven, cooker hood. He asked for the dimensions of the room, and we told him how many windows. And that was it – he came up with a price of “ten or eleven thousand”. We asked what that bought – he said “a kitchen, with the appliances you want”.  This is a room 3.3m x 2.9m, by the way – we weren’t looking for gold plated stuff. We asked about fitting – another £2k. Probably. And that was it. No printed quote, no idea of what appliances, no notion of how many cupboards … nothing. I bet if we’d had them in to measure and quote it would miraculously go up another couple of thousand.

So we won’t be going to Kitchenhaus, and I suggest you don’t either. We’ll probably go to Merlin, the independent place on Sculcoates Lane, who will do as good a job for about one third the price.

Mirrored from kestrel.org.