Shhhh. Don't tell the paint Mafia.

First - a question. If anyone has the answer - I would love comments, rants, or just plain conspiracy theories.

Why doesn't Kelly Moore let you buy their damn color swatch booklet? I'm not sure what you call them. The full Kelly Moore color pallet?



For now I am calling it "the precious".

This week I've been buying a never ending supply of paint, all in different colors, trying to find one I like. I think I'm up to about 15 quarts at this point.

After the first couple of visits to Kelly Moore I asked if I could just buy one of these things. At that point I had only bought 5 quarts.

The helpful person who up to this point had attended to my every paint need - flat out said I couldn't buy one.

So you can imagine my glee when my painter showed up and said I could have one of his.

When I asked him why Kelly Moore wouldn't just let me buy it, I couldn't quite get the answer out of him. But he did manage to tell me that he had to give them his name, address, and phone number to borrow one. When I told him I didn't want to get him into trouble - he simply replied by saying that he would just go to another store. So now I have one for free.

So - this is what I don't get:

Having the full Kelly Moore color guide that I can just walk around with certainly makes it more likely I will go back to their store to buy paint. I mean... how many of those little freebie paint booklets do you have at your house? I have a ton of them, but they never have all the colors the company makes. Not finding the color I like in those books just makes me want to go buy paint from someone else.

Today we drove around our neighborhood color matching house colors we liked. And you know what? We drove right to Kelly Moore and bought more paint. If we hadn't had the color chart we would have gotten the paint color matched from a big box store.

So why not just let customers buy them?