It is not very easy to find a quality rug pad in retail stores. The reason is that the retailer does not want to tie up much money in inventory as well as the fact that the rug pad takes space. What many retailers now do is drop ship the pad to the customer from a separate warehouse, without even seeing the product. The problem here is that the warehouse usually stores the pads folded in packages and these could be sitting on a shelf for weeks and months until shipped. It is best to avoid rug padding, whether from a retail brick and mortar store or from an online store, that is pre-cut and prepackaged.
I recently received a phone call from a woman who wanted to buy a rug pad. She stated that she had just received one that she ordered online from one of the mass marketed stores. She told me that she placed the pad on her floor and noticed bumps every 18 inches. This is where the pad was folded. The type of pad she received was a jute and rubber combination pad. Apparently, wherever there were fold marks, the rubber was sticking to itself as if melted together. This, she claims, created bumps through her rug. The problem here is that these bumps cause a trip hazard for people walking on the rug. The bumps also create an awkward look to your rug and finally, the bumps will cause premature wear patterns on those parts of the rug.
It is best to order and buy your rug pads, whether they be rubber pads, jute pads, non slip pads or a combination of any, from a company that stores the rug pad in rolls. Rug pads are manufactured in rolls of 3′, 6′ and 12′ wide and most warehouses cut these rolls immediately and package them to sit on a shelf or to ship to retailers. The major problem here is that such a practice is hard to find because these roils take up space. Most stores will not go through the effort of stocking the rolls, cutting to the rug size and then wrapping and shipping. To them, this is wasted valuable time when they can simply either stock some packages that take up a fraction of the space and that require no cutting at all or to drop ship your order direct from the warehouse that stocks the pads.
At Rug Pad Corner, http://www.rugpadcorner.com, we take pride in offering the proper rug pads in the proper way, by cutting each order when it comes in. This guarantees the quality of the pad as well as the function of its use when it is in your home. This is the old fashioned way of doing business and there may be a few others around doing it this way. If you find one, go for it and you can rest assured your rug pad will lie as flat as possible, do the job it was meant for and last as long as it should.
