Office Depot (South Square)

Overview

The Office Depot (Store #122) near South Square shopping center in Durham, NC is located in the former Big Star building, the sole remaining (out)building from the original South Square Mall.

Reference

• listing at Office Depot web site

Encounters

• 2006-10-28, from Woozle: I went into this store a little before noon, trying to find tubes for shipping posters (this would have been ideal, but there were plenty of alternative possibilities). As I approached the shipping supplies area (on the left wall as you enter the store, kind of hidden from the main open area), the employee who had been apparently re-filing items from a shopping cart went off somewhere and didn't come back. All I could find was one tube, mis-filed, of the wrong length. After substantial hunting around to see if there were other places I should be looking, I approached the lady at the UPS shipping counter, who paged someone (through their wireless system, not an overhead PA) to assist me; she said he would meet me in the shipping supplies area. I went back there and waited 10 minutes, but no employees walked within hailing distance. I went back and talked to the shipping counter lady again to make sure I had the right place; she confirmed this, and paged the same person again – this time describing what I was wearing, in case the other employee had gotten confused and helped someone else on their way to me. I waited for another 5-10 minutes, but nobody ever showed up.

So I dropped off my used ink cartridge and went to the Office Max at New Hope Commons instead, where they did at least have one of the kind of tube I needed and the shipping supplies department at least didn't look like it came from Soviet Russia. I suppose I could have asked again, but it didn't seem likely that Office Depot would be able to pull additional tubes out of thin air – I should note that I had been to that area of the store several times in the past half-year or so looking for poster tubes, and it had always looked about that empty.

(Does Office Depot still do the thing where you bring them a used ink cartridge and they give you a ream of recycled paper? I couldn't find any mention of this in the store, but I was a bit distracted with irritation by the time I dropped off the ink cartridge.)

It's a bit sad, because I used to be a big fan of this store. They were the first big-box office supply store in the area (1980s) and always had much more stuff than the alternatives, and better organized... but now all the little office supply stores are gone, so there's no alternative when they start to go downhill like this (except to drive further to the next big box store).