When I first moved to Rigaud, I thought to myself "Wow! How convenient to have a Hardware Store 100 meters from my house"... if only I knew what I know now.
I've paid thousands of dollars to this establishment over the years to perform renovations at our townhouse but sadly, most of the wood that I have received from them was of poor quality. Most of the materials are kept outside exposed to the weather... so I've had to return many twisted and warped pieces over the years (especially long ones) due to this reason. Very frustrating, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
I guess I always just went there out of convenience because they are so close, but no more, and I will tell you why. It is sometimes very hard to order things from them because...
There is a huge language barrier! Yesterday, I went there with my father-in-law who was born and raised in Ontario (Ottawa and Toronto). He does not know French and only comes across the border from time to time to visit and also sometimes to help out with projects around the house. He is the one who took the count for all of the materials we needed to complete some renos in our basement. So we go to Pont Masson to pick up said materials, to be greeted by what we eventually concluded to be a man who refused to serve in english. The convo went something like "Hi there", "Bonjour"... "How are you?", "Ca va toi?"... "Good, thanks... we need so and so materials".... "Est-ce-que tu parle francais?", being partially billingual, I say "well I could try my best to translate this conversation but for the most part, we are english... I'm not very good at translating building material terms". I will spare you the trouble of having to read every spoken word but to make the story short, the person refused to even try to have the convo in english and would repeat every single word we said back to us in french. What we got from this attitude was that he knew what we were saying for the most part, he just wanted to give us a hard time. To be clear, I am not criticizing the man but his poor service. It took forever just to get the first set of materials marked correctly into his system. We tried to ask for different types of Roxul which is where everything went to heck. He had no clue what we were saying. So I said "with all due respect, do you have somebody who can serve us in english because this is getting really complicated for nothing". He got a coworker. Another guy comes to the counter. He was a little better but still mostly had no clue what we were asking for. We eventually got 80% of our order done when we were informed they didn't have Roxul that could fit into 16 inch spacing, only 24. They recommended we cut all of the 24 inch into 16, not happening! We wanted to do renos, not put together a Safe n Sound puzzle. So we decided to order everything BUT that.
When the order was complete, we requested to have the sheets of drywall delivered to my house which is literally 100 meters down the road from their establishment. With the order being hundreds of dollars, we figured we could get a decent price on delivery. Nope, they wanted to charge us 45$ and said it was for the gas. 45$ worth of gas for 100 meters of driving! We asked for a better deal, they bluntly refused. We told them to forget it and I said "glad to see your language matters more to you than your business".
They will not get another dime of my money. From now on, I will be going to the hardware store in Hudson. Perfectly billingual service, the materials and tools were cheaper and in better shape. On top of it all, we got fast delivery at 20$ for a trip from Hudson to Rigaud. Imagine that! Half the price that Pont-Masson was charging and these folk had an establishment much further from my place.
Will not be returning to fill their pockets until they can treat all of their clientele fairly and equally with the respect and courtesy they deserve, french or english. I gave 3 stars because they do have one guy who has great service. Unfortunately, he wasn't there that day.
