I’m impressed that they fit it within 4 hours, to be honest.
Assuming 15 minutes each way to the hardware store, that’s 150 minutes or 2.5 hours total for just driving.
So talking with salespeople, checking out, and the whole process of actually installing the dishwasher would have to fit within 1.5 hours, which seems tight to me.
I grew up about 3 minutes away from a big hardware store, doing projects all the time. This contributed to a very wrongheaded idea about how long projects take.
When I moved into my current house it was suddenly a 40 minute trip. For the first couple years I couldn’t get anything done on Saturdays because I’d never needed to optimize away trips to the store before.
I wonder if it was four consecutive hours or if it was four hours in total, spread over several days. This sounds like the kind of project where you spend half a hour after work each day, every day thinking you'd finally be done...
Are you saying it's closer? Or do you refer to using time instead of distance?
Even if you live in a city, getting to a hardware store usually takes at least 15 minutes unless you really live like right next door. Usually takes longer. Distance is a bad measure of the time it takes.
One can easily overestimate how fast walking and taking public transportation is and how close hardware stores are to people, and underestimate how fast cars are.
As a real world example you can consider this:
From a small village called Luvia, Finland, it takes 18 minutes to drive 19 km to a general purpose hardware store (K-Rauta Pori), while it can take easily 30 min to an hour to traverse this on foot from Pori city center (ie carrying everything yourself), or at least 16 minutes if you conveniently live right next to a bus stop (and there's absolutely not just a few minutes between rides).
I live in a suburban area, and I have 2 hardware stores within 5 minutes, a Menards and Harbor freight within 10, and like 5 big box hardware stores within 15.
Assuming 15 minutes each way to the hardware store, that’s 150 minutes or 2.5 hours total for just driving.
So talking with salespeople, checking out, and the whole process of actually installing the dishwasher would have to fit within 1.5 hours, which seems tight to me.