I bought several Menard buildings and accessories recently for the layout; I purchased these online and all were shipped by Fed ex. I had the following issues:
Minor issue with Fury Motors: Both trees had become unglued and loose in package; display car on carousel had also come loose and was laying in package (but undamaged). Easy enough to re-glue the trees so really no big deal.
Parking garage: poorly packaged; back corner of top of garage was crushed and cracked. The two inserts used to mask the tunnel in the back (if you opt to not run track through there) were broken. I contacted Menard's and they offered to replace it; I countered with just giving me a partial refund and i would do something to mask the break; they countered with offering me a free lighted truck which I initially thought was too low of an offer but I went ahead and settled for that.
Hospital and the lighted trucks purchased arrived fine.
Tampa towers: I unfortunately did not noticed when I received it and unpacked it but the sides of the tower are warped and not square. I noticed that a few days after i had added it to the layout...it looked out of level to me so i tried to level it and then it dawned on me that it was warped. I didn't feel like taking it down from the layout and I had already disposed of the packaging so that's on me for not paying closer attention. I'll just live with it.
Lighted billboard: the base has some large paint bubbles which I figured I would just pretend is weathering. Unfortunately when I installed it into the layout the paint began to flake off. I can touch it up with some similar paint which is no big deal but somewhat annoying.
For those who aren't familiar with these buildings, the tower and the parking garage aren't made of plastic or metal but of a press-board type material which is then spray-painted. As evident by the parking garage and billboard, the paint chips off very easily. Some of the defects (like the parking garage and Fury Motors loose trees) were due to poor packaging. There also seems to be some issues with paint adhesion. Not sure what caused the warped sides of the Tower; it could be the press-board tends to warp when it's not constrained (Tampa Tower is a model of a tower under construction; the top three floors are open back/front so there's nothing fully constraining the top halves of the sides which might explain why they warped).
I am not faulting Menard's; they did promptly respond to the one issue I did raise with them; the others I thought minor or didn't notice until too late. I have no doubt that if I had raised any of the other issues with them they would have responded in kind. I did tell them I thought they needed to look into packaging as it seemed inadequate in many cases.
On the bright side, these are very cool buildings. They aren't cheap, but with the included figures and die cast they are pretty impressive. Just thought I would give everyone a head's up that if you do buy any of these to look them over carefully.
