We just went through a nightmare with a discontinued Home Depot product that the customer had picked up for their rental unit. It was 800 square feet of click-together, and it was my business partner's contract. He opened a bundle, and assembled some of the flooring with no problem.
So he approved it, and they signed the contract.

We showed up and started laying the stuff, and it was terrible. We kept thinking we'd figure out the best assembly method as we went along; with an unfamiliar product, there's always a learning curve. We got it to work after a fashion, but it was taking way too much time and effort to get it to stay in place, and there were areas where it didn't work at all. It finally came down to two options: they were going to have to pay at least twice the original cost, to have an inferior product hammered into shape, or they could cut their losses and stop the install.

The end result is that the customer is going to return unopened bundles, we get paid for what we installed, and we'll take out the home depot flooring and replace it with a reputable product from our own supplier.

We've installed floors the customer bought, and never had this much trouble. This customer agreed to pay us for trying to make a defective product work, but not everyone would be so accommodating. They could clearly see the problems, and if you read the online reviews for the product, it had three pros giving it a red flag.

We can take a hard line and refuse to install any product we didn't buy, and that seems extreme. My partner is proposing listing how many days we expect to take on a floor, and then negotiating with the customer for additional costs if it runs past that amount of time.

I'm sorry that the customer is out a lot of money on this, but I will get some satisfaction in showing them what a good floor looks like, and how quickly it goes in.

We didn't read these reviews before we tried to lay the product. My business partner is not on the Internet, and he didn't have his girlfriend check on it. I don't know why the customer didn't review it beforehand. If I had thought it about it, I would have done some checking myself.

I always put in my contract if they or I stop the job because of milling issues, acts of God etc I get paid for that amount of square footage. You have to these days with all the crap being made.

We finished putting down the new flooring last week. It's thinner than the Home Depot product, but it went together well. We learned that the original patent on click-together is called uni-click. I don't know who owns that patent, but any company that wants to use the system for their own click-together line has to pay a licensing fee. If they're using uni-click, it's more of a guarantee that it's going to be a product that works.

The click-together is OK for a rental unit. I don't know that it goes together any faster than nail-down pre-finished. One big problem with the 'bad' product was that it wouldn't back-lay--you couldn't reverse direction with it.
Whereas the uni-click floor worked OK if you back-laid it--clicked in the pieces from behind. It was slower than front-laying it, though.

Ideally, click-together systems would have special double-sided courses, that would allow an installer to click in new pieces from both sides. Something would serve the function of slip-tongue on T&G. As far as I know, no manufacturer has that item.

Yeah, uniclic was patented by UNILIN and also made Quickstep laminate, now owned by Mohawk. Many many companies pay $$ up for the use of that patent. Also on hardwood and now luxury vinyl tile.
There's alot of crap locking mechanisms out there like rotating lock, 3G and 5G systems like what Pergo uses.

I just talked to tech support at Kahrs, which had a click-together system I used to install years ago. The woman I was talking to understood why a double-sided row would be useful to professionals, and she said that she would pass the idea on to marketing. She agreed that back-laying the product was OK for small areas, but not practical for changing direction down the hallway in the middle of the house.