Bought a lighting fixture for the Polislice kitchen, which has been in a hellish renovation process for going on a year. Just found out the lighting store has been shuttered. Can’t get the fixture or the money back. Could get in line in the company’s bankruptcy proceedings, but my $350 is a pittance next to the tens of thousands they owe their vendor creditors, so my recovery is a snowball in hell.

Bigger picture is that I also know of a tile store and a kitchen/bathrooms fixtures store that have gone belly up in the last month too.  Big box stores are running all of these specialty stores out of business. In my area you can’t spend less than $10-15,000 to renovate a small, I mean smaaaaaall bathroom. A kitchen renovation is a year’s salary for a lot of people (and another year’s salary for the marriage counselor, yipes, this is hard).

Mind you, Home Depot Expo, their upscale brand (but still a big box store) went out after the 2008 meltdown.  That was the first casualty.

As prices go up you can go one of two ways on this, philosophically: 1. if I’m going to spend a lot of money no matter what, better get what I want, get quality and at least love what I’m going to have to live with, or 2. keep that number down anyway I can – go cheap.

Apparently for most, option 2. is the way they choose and the beneficiary is Home Depot and Lowes and a lot of crappy do-it-yourselfing.