Johnny Rotten

I worked at Home Depot for eight months back in 2001, and it is indeed a shitty store. My theory is that they began firing people left and right when the economy turned--and they noticed that business didn't suffer as a result. So they kept cutting employee numbers down to the bone.

But people keep coming. The prices are low, low, low. You take a look at that bargain power drill in the Sunday ad, and you forget how long it takes to wait in line. The front end at Home Depot, and most chain retail stores these days, is the most obscene bottleneck I have ever seen. And what do you do if you can find that drill, because it's been sold out, or misplaced, or mis-tagged? Good luck trying to find someone to help you. Everyone but the cashiers--everyone--has a store radio on them. And you hear people getting paged on the intercom constantly. But there just aren't enough people to cover the floor and deal with the problems, because the corporation doesn't care.

It's nuts. When I worked the Returns desk, just about every other transaction required an authorization I wasn't qualified to execute. Even the fucking 10% off coupons required a front end supervisor to come over to my register, turn his key and enter a code. And, because the front end was chronically, almost abusively understaffed, he or she was usually already busy working another register, resolving a dispute or running desperately through the store for a price check because the person working that particular department wasn't answering their phone or the department phone bolted to the shelf on every aisle.

Plus the people working these counters have the most ridiculous work "schedules." You never know what days of the week you're going to work and what shifts you're going to take on those days. Closing one day at 11:30 PM and opening at 5:45 AM the following morning? Tough shit.

I think it got better after I left, once they canned the smooth-talking imbecile who apparently didn't have an ounce of hiring discretion. He was all big talk about working at the Atlanta HQ someday, but he never got past the store level because he couldn't figure out the basic procedure of who to hire and who not to hire. Way too many meatheads and slackers. Store had the highest turnover of any in the US, with 80% of the staff gone every three months.

A truly soulless black hole of the retail world that confirms all the cynical doubts you've had about corporate America.

If you want to get rid of this kind of madness, you have to convince yourself that saving a few dollars is not worth hunting down the item somewhere in that gargantuan cavern of a store, then waiting in the mind-numbing line for the inevitable price checks, credit card authorizations, check screening, and price screwups. With thousands upon thousands of odd-shaped items, price tags are bound to fall off. Then there's the nuts, bolts, washers, etc., which you have to look up in a book. Some of them look almost identical but have very different prices.

Don't get me started on people trying to "return" used-up power tools I'd never seen before in my life, and the iron-clad store policies that forced me to call for a store manager every five minutes.

Home Depot is a pile of shit for everyone who stays in that store for more than half an hour.