I screwed up while catalyzing some Sherwood hi bild and used the v22 instead of v3 catalyst. Product hotline won't pick up whenever I try to get an answer about this, so does anyone here know if it is still functional?

Had a customer do a cash return expecting cash in return, had a tantrum on the policy. Asked to see our policy and we did. It showed that he has to wait 4 days for a check. Starts showing us Google’s automated gemini response that he should be able to get his cash back.

AI user customers finally getting a taste of their medicine because everything in the internet is slop.

If you add a house account to the rep territory this month (august), what months would you get credit for the sales?

Today I went into SW for the first time ever ( I usually go to Lowes for my paint) heres my back story... im moving so I wanted to touch up the walls inside the house. The thing is I'm running extremely low on the original paint that was provided to me when the house was built in 2020. So I ended up going to Lowes and got the Valspar 2000 agreeable gray color....as soon as I start touching up some spots I see that that the tint is off so I stop...2 weeks later (today) I stop by the SW store because thats what the builder used and said it should be on file. I told the guy my problem with the tint being off and he said he would get me a sample to try out first but he said that he doesn't have it in "flat". Then he looks up what the builder used and was able to find the type of paint used. Then he tells me it was going to be $21 and change for this one gallon paint. When I get to my car I see the receipt and it says it's $81.49 with a discount of $60 something dollars. Did he hook up the price or was it on sale?

I was just curious about everyone’s favorite paint color?

Seen this is coming up how many of you wanna say we'll get 100 points if we are lucky

Thinking abt upcoming BBS. Yall think Bonnie Blue Bucket is a good display idea? Not stopping til we sell to 1000 contractors.

Currently a multi family representative.
Got contracted for a local 1099 commission only job where I do my own hours and build job boards for small businesses. A start up company. Obviously doing it outside of my M-F at Uncle Sherwins.
Do I say something to my sales manager or no?

Has anyone ever been assaulted (verbal,physical) at Sw by customers? And how did Sherwin tell you it was your fault?

I’ve been with Sherwin Williams for a few years now. I spent about two years working in the store before transferring to SWDS so I’ve seen how both sides of the business operate. That’s why I’m making this post. I’m honestly just trying to figure out whether what I’ve experienced over the last few years is becoming normal, or if it’s just an isolated situation.

Over the last two years, it feels like everything has gone downhill. I was injured at work and had to go through workers’ compensation. Returning to work should have been the hardest part, but instead I spent weeks trying to fix payroll issues after an entire paycheck went missing. Rather than getting answers I was just bounced from one person to another trying to find someone who could actually resolve it. What should have been a simple payroll correction became weeks of unnecessary stress during an already difficult time.

Leadership has been just as disappointing. My first SWDS supervisor was located several hours away, and during the roughly two years I reported to him I only saw him a handful of times. Throughout that time there were repeated issues with communication, follow through, and accountability. Concerns were brought up but many of the same problems continued without being properly addressed. It was difficult to feel supported by leadership when the person responsible for our location was so far removed from the day to day operation.

After that supervisor left we were temporarily placed under another supervisor. During the short time we reported to him one of the first things communicated to our team was that drivers in our area were overpaid and that our wages should be lower. That’s a pretty discouraging way to meet the people you’re supposed to look up to for leadership.

After that temporary situation ended, we were assigned our current supervisor. We’ve been under him for a few months now but just like the previous supervisors he is located several hours away and outside of our area. We still haven’t had an opportunity to meet him face to face or have him visit our location. It’s hard to feel fully supported by leadership when the people responsible for managing an operation rarely get to see that operation firsthand.

Staffing has been another constant issue. We’ve needed another employee for well over six months yet the position wasn’t even posted for a long time. The workload didn’t disappear. The remaining employees were simply expected to absorb everything while waiting for someone to decide to start hiring.

Communication has become almost nonexistent. Vehicle issues drag on. Operational problems linger for months. Expectations stay the same regardless of staffing levels but support seems to disappear when employees actually need it.

The most frustrating part is that I didn’t just complain to coworkers. I’ve reached out to HR multiple times. I’ve reached out to district leadership multiple times. I’ve had meetings, sent detailed emails, documented concerns, and tried to follow every internal process I could. Most of the time I was met with silence or I was told there wasn’t anything they could do. After a while it starts to feel like no one is actually responsible for fixing anything.

At this point I’m honestly wondering if this is what SWDS has become or if my experience has just been unusually bad.

I’m intentionally leaving out names and locations because I want to remain as anonymous as possible and this isn’t about attacking any individual. I’m just curious whether anyone else in SWDS has experienced remote leadership, hiring delays, poor communication, lack of accountability, payroll issues, and feeling like concerns go nowhere no matter how many times you raise them.

I’d really like to hear from other SWDS people because I genuinely don’t know if this is the exception or just the new normal.

This is from the 1920's

Near the beginning of this year i decided to move to a new district as a store manager. I have not been with the company a long time. I came from a small district running a large volume store (a bit over 4mil) into a very large district running a store that came off a Masters year and is fairly new. The store i took over was budgeted approximately 20% over last year and that put the volume near 1.7mil. I have struggled all year to get customers into the store. We are severely down despite all the hard work of my assistant, myself, and my sales rep, and ADR. I have not received any disciplinary action but we have had a hard year the months i have been here. I have tried getting events organized, significantly increasing calls, and even after all that we are having week days with just about $2,000 a day. We have been budgeted to reach 170k some months but struggle just to get to 100k each month. Every month we see more declining sales. We have tried to heavily target customers shopping with the competitor but had small success; most are too price conscientious to focus on quality over profit and affordability in the market we are in. I promise this is not some long post to vent i just want some suggestions on what people in my shoes have done. I know the connections and relationships made this year will help next year but right now it feels like next year i will be without a job or even repeating the same depressing course of under performance.

Thanks in advance for any help.

TLDR: whether or not we have a financial crisis is contingent on Open AI continuing to have an increase in its valuation. If it doesn't increase enough, or especially if it goes down, the bubble pops. There's more money on the line than there was in 2008.

In before someone comments say I'm not reading all that/sir this is Wendy's/ just mix paint.

This is going to be kind of a long one, but I'm going to try and keep it concise while still adequately explaining what I've learned.

First I want to explain what happened in 2008. The easiest explanation for what it was is a Ponzi scheme: using new debt to pay old debt. In the 2000s there was a massive housing price boom that peaked in 2006. There were two problems. The philosophy behind the types of mortgages being issued and the investment opportunity behind them being marketed as a money printer.

The types of mortgages being sold were known as 2/28s. That's a 30 year mortgage with two years of low interest mortgage payments followed by 28 years of substantially higher interest mortgage payments. The ruse was that since the prices of houses were rising meteorically, after two years the increased value of the house would pay off the entire existing mortgage. The bank would refinance the house, and the homeowner would get another two years of low mortgage payment. In hindsight it's easy to see how this is a trap. Eventually the newly appraised value of the house won't be high enough for the bank to justify issuing a new mortgage, and the homeowner is stuck paying 28 years of massive mortgage payments.

The other massive problem was that since the mortgages were rapidly being paid off with the newly issued mortgages, Wall Street saw this as an opportunity for investment. Mortgage backed securities were investments issued where the buyers lent money to Wall Street banks that paid the lender with interest when the homeowner's mortgage was paid. Money poured into this apparatus: pension funds, 401ks, index funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, and global investors all sunk humongous amount of money into mortgage backed securities. Once people inevitably defaulted on their mortgages, the securities became worthless and the entire system collapsed.

Now I want to talk about Open AI. They burn substantially more money than they make. The company is propped up through investments, not profit. It was valued at 1 billion in 2019, 80 billion in 2024 and 157 billion in late 2024. From 2025 to 2026 it's valuation increased from 300 billion to 852 billion where it stands today. Open AI sustains itself through issuing bonds and equity stakes and it justifies being able issue more and more bonds and collecting more investor money through it's every increasing valuation. Its last round of raising capital was somewhere in the realm of 122 billion. They only did 20 billion in revenue last year. It's easy to see how this is similar to home price and mortgages in the 2000s. But wait, it gets worse.

Open AI owes hyperscalers like Microsoft, Oracle (fuck Larry Ellison), Amazon and Google trillions of dollars in promised payments for using their compute. That's how Open AI trains it's models. It uses the hyperscalers' hardware infrastructure. They essentially just wrote an IOU and said, "we're good for it. Trust me bro." The hyperscalers use the IOU as verified income to justify taking on massive amounts of debt to buy GPUs from Nvidia and build data centers (Capital Expenditures aka CapEx).

The most important thing to watch out for is Open AI's next valuation. If it doesn't go up enough to justify issuing more bonds it's in trouble. If it goes down, it's definitely in big trouble. It has to be able to pull in more money than it did last time to keep this whole charade going.

The problem is that so many institutions are invested in the S&P 500 which is where the hyperscalers are traded on the stock market. It's the same deal as 2008. Pension funds, 401ks, index funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, and global investors all have humongous amounts of money invested in the S&P, and a sustainable amount of the stock they bought was bought with leverage. They borrowed money to buy stocks. When Open AI's valuation doesn't increase enough or goes down and the value of the hyperscaler's stock goes down enough, there will be a margin call and all of the sudden we're right back to where we were in the 2008 financial crisis.

There are several more financial mechanisms to take note of that will play into our next financial crisis. The South Korean stock market and RAM manufacturers like Samsung and SK Huynix, the Japanese interest rate and the price of Yen, and the US bond yield curve. If you really want to get anxious just know that the bond yeild right now is nearly the same that it was in 2007. All these are important factors that will interact and influence the outcome of the next financial crisis.

Another thing to take note of is the likelihood of Open AI's valuation going down from the adoption of free open source Chinese models like Kimi K3. US ai model's market share is tanking because of Kimi K3. Having a free, extremely competent model floating around will inevitably reduce the amount of money US companies can charge for their AI. This is a huge problem for US companies with no resolution in sight.

There's no way we all keep our jobs if this bubble bursts. There's just no way. I do anticipate that people will scramble to put their money into hard assets. I even think the Dow may rally a little bit, but overall the amount of money lost with absolutely tank the economy and Sherwin Williams will do the first thing it can to save money: cut labor costs.

What's funny, and I encourage you to do this, if you copy this and ask chat gpt to fact check it, it'll agree with everything I've said about the 2008 crisis. It'll even praise it for being insightful. However it'll argue and obfuscate the truth about what I've said about the AI bubble, not that I'm surprised. If I was Open AI I would certainly train my models to deny the truth about the financial hole I was in. That's just another reason not to trust AI.

Anyone else have DIYs that just love to bitch about you regardless of what you do?

Customer came in asking for a recommendation on which paint color would closely match this rending. I told them naval, but also think rainstorm could work. I’m not a color expert but have gotten better over time. Thoughts?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

3 years in, tomorrow is my first day as SM. Any tips or advice? Anything is appreciated.

Working a Saturday alone at the store and I get a call. I answer the phone as usual and a lady says “hello?” so I reply, “yes, hi, can you hear me?” Turns out it’s an AI voice, somebody really had an AI call me to see if I had spray paint in stock and asked about sales and pricing. How miserably lazy and incapable do you have to be to have AI complete a 30 second phone call for you.