I make it pretty well known that I am a buyer of the Sunday Paper. I buy it specifically for coupons and advertisements. Needless to say if I want to read a biased opinion, I will spell check my own work.

When I was paging through the most current ads in the paper looking for a sale on paint to redo the garage, I noticed that only 2 of the 4 local big box home improvement stores actually put ads in the paper. It could just be the local paper and they might actually put them in the enemy paper. Menard’s and Fleet Farm have their ads in the local paper and on their websites if you didn’t manage to buy a paper that week. Lowe’s and Home Depot on the other hand which I would consider to be the more expensive stores (usually with better store brand products) seem to think that it isn’t worth the time or effort to put together a weekly ad.

The major reason this bothers me is as a smart consumer I would like to be able to compare prices and note the sales at the beginning of the week, and will usually only turn to websites if I am looking for a specific item to purchase. This makes Lowe’s and Home Depot ads online completely useless for my purposes and to top it off they usually don’t include any sales other than typical lawn and garden chemicals.

Do you prefer print ads to browse through or do you prefer having 4 windows open on your computer comparing the local paint prices and brands? Or are you one of the trusting shoppers who blindly prefer a local home improvement store?