I sell Shaw 3/4 solid hickory natural for 3.99 a ft on promo about once a month and stil make money. And that is a buying buy the carton price. HD buying tuckloads can surely sell it for that. It will be 1st quality and nice stuff. I also buy 2nds from shaw occasionally. They would never have the quantity of 2nds needed to distribute to HD. We buy a truckload of wood 2nds and it cleans them out of a style. The warranty is inflated by HD but 30 years is a joke anyway. The guy having the problem with Bruce is just a Bruce thing in my opinion. Any lower cost Bruce products has problems based on our experieince. We allow an extra 10% waste for Bruce lower cost stuff. That is what HD and Lowes sells a lot of. You will not have troubles with this shaw product. Guaranteed. I know Shaw just too well. Watch and see and learn. Good luck with the Hickory.

Yes, we have the Highland Hickory. I have it in my home office room. I have a chair with plastic wheels on it, and it hasn't made the slightest mark on the floor. My 70 pound Labrador has romped all over it and not a single mark on the floor. We dropped a 10 pound dumbbell on it as a test and it didn't even dent it. The 50 pound one did, but only when we hit it with the sharp edge of the weight. I had a scrap piece that I hit repeatedly with a hammer to tap in the flooring, and you'd never know it to look at that piece. The ONLY thing that made a mark on the floor was when I dropped a drywall saw pointy tip straight down on the floor, and even that was only a slight mark. You wouldn't see it if I didn't point it out to you. We love that room so much that we're going to do our whole house in it. It's awesome!!

Sigh...another partial floor renovation with a man-made product. I'm sorry you have to learn this the hard way. Man-made products like laminate, vinyl, engineered hardwood, factory finished hardwood, etc have a shelf-life of (roughly) 24 months. Once they have had their day, they disappear forever. The big manufacturers need to stay on trend so that customers can find what they want RIGHT NOW! If the manufacturers let their lines go stale they lose out on millions of dollars worth of sales each month. It's how they renew themselves when they sell products that can 'live' for 25 years. So what to do? Not much. You will either move to something completely different, or start over. If it has been more than 2 years since you installed your floor, you will be hard pressed to find enough of the product to satisfy a medium sized renovation (200sf) let alone 'the rest of the house'. Please show us pics. There may be some on Houzz who can find you a decent look alike.

Currently we do not have any more. There is still a small area in the laundry room that has not been reclaimed but the most we will have is 10 to 11 planks.