Orange Aprons and Grey Flooring in Every Aisle
Inside one of America’s top Corporations, The Home Depot
I have successfully infiltrated the walls of one of America’s capital behemoths. Each day that I arrive at the place of my employment I throw on an apron that is colored sour and acidic. On this apron are the words “The Home Depot”. An odd name for anyone working an entry-level position for the home improvement company because nothing about it reminds me of home. At most, there are a few irrelevant similarities, such as both containing door hinges and light bulbs. I wouldn’t say that small pieces of brass constitute a home — just as I wouldn’t compare the small collection of books in my bedroom to the Library of Alexandria, or liken myself to Ronald Reagan because we’ve each eaten a few ribeye steaks in our lifetimes.
Home is warm with blankets and nice smelling candles and sunlight. There’s a kind of comfort at home that is unrivaled. I can traverse every room of my house at night with the lights off. I know where to find my cats and where my cans of sodium-enriched soup are — even though both are likely to kill me at some point. The Home Depot is a wormhole and the air is asphyxiating. Large, open spaces are filled with displays that read “Buy NOW” and “Low Price”. Humanity is blurred into a conveyor belt. Sunlight is replaced with grey flooring and bright candles turn as pale as old baseball film — if not extinguished entirely because of safety hazards and all that. The same advertisements shoot from the loudspeakers every day and employees ask themselves the same questions every day. Why am I here? What’s the point? What time is it?
My arrival at The Home Depot was not of journalistic ambition but instead of desperation. I, like many who enter the corporate retail industry, desperately needed a job. I needed one fast. I had been working in bars and restaurants for years and was comfortable enough in doing so. I enjoyed the work. My devoted labor, though rarely through employer-provided wages, ensured that I got by just fine. The harder I worked, the more money I made. The more I smiled and laughed, the more money I made.
The restaurant industry was among those most devastated by the emergence of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Since 2013, restaurants have accounted for 13 to 15 million members of the annual US labor force. I was among the many who lost their primary source of income. Some took to the bottle. Others went to the unemployment line. I did both. I hated both.
With Covid-19 state guidelines constantly in a liquid state, I had a bar gig some months. Others I didn’t. 2020 sucked — but anyone reading this knows that. It was around November when the restaurant I had been working at closed its doors for the winter season. It’s a third-generation, family-owned eatery in New Jersey — a great place to both dine and to work. I’m eager for them to reopen again in the spring of this year.
Workers know bill payments don’t stop when your income stops. Fires don’t politely go out when you close off the sink tap. Life is vicious and it is seldom friendly. The other day I was so hungover that I decided to puke my guts out — thankfully my hair is short. Anatomy didn’t hold my hand afterward. Almost immediately I experienced the most splitting headache I’ve ever had. I swore that I’d never drink again, but our deals with God are often as honest as assuming that the kitchen sink will put out a living room fire.
I took the job at The Home Depot because I was under the impression that I could obtain health insurance through employment there. I was willing to accept a lower wage to secure health benefits during an unpredictable health crisis. My car and student loan payments were due in the coming weeks. My savings account was getting smaller as each sad envelope arrived. I found out that I would not be obtaining health benefits. Shit.
On my first day at The Home Depot, I sat alone in a room with a computer screen for six straight hours. I am not exaggerating, it was six hours — 9 am to 3 pm. At three o’clock, I snuck away to my car and ate a turkey sandwich with the urgency of an empty-stomached buzzard.
I didn’t know anyone. The manager who had interviewed me and who I had greeted that first morning sat me down at the computer and vanished. Several employees had called out of work on that specific day and the manager had to cover for the absentees.
During the six-hour stint, I was subjected to one corporate-produced video after another corporate-produced video. How to use a ladder. Click. How to push a rolling ladder. Click. How to lift a box. Click. How to find a barcode. Click. How to say hello to customers. Click. It seemed that whoever made these modules assumed its viewers would be citizens of Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy.
I remember feeling like a conscious robot scheduled for a manufacturer reset. I wanted to run, but I was magnetized. Weighed down by debt and gravity, and boxed in by grey walls. I had never been trained on how to say “hello”. I never want to be taught how again.
I fell asleep for a few seconds multiple times. I was glued to the computer screen for so long that my eyes hurt. Have you ever tried reading outside in the winter while the wind is lively? You can barely keep your eyes open. I felt like a porn addict unable to unhitch himself from the computer mouse in his hand. There were a couple of instances where I stood up and tried to find someone to direct me towards what I should do next. The most anyone could do was to point me towards an empty manager’s office.
There was one video that stood out to me most of all. An anti-unionizing message. This video, though I do not recall the specific dialogue, can be boiled down to a very simple concept. The Home Depot would like its workers to think that they are treated so exceptionally well that unionization is unnecessary and silly. That paying employees $1 more than the New Jersey state minimum wage was some sort of an epic commitment to our futures.
Think about this. The price of a single Home Depot stock on my first day, December 21, 2020, according to Yahoo Finance, opened at 268.56 and closed at 270.99. It would take a new employee twenty hours of labor, before taxes, to afford a single share of Home Depot stock on December 21. Yet, somehow, in the company’s eyes, we were being provided for divinely.
I quickly became conscious of the flatlining effect that corporations have on workers and the human spirit. Within a week I found that I was butting heads with my supervisor regularly. I was the new guy so I mostly stayed silent about the disagreements.
Typically our blows came when my supervisor would imply that I lacked basic knowledge or couldn’t facilitate the simplest tasks. The customer service area, where I am stationed, has two entrances spaced apart by about ten or fifteen feet. One evening my supervisor requested that I grab an item for a customer. I used the entrance that was closest and most convenient for me to utilize at the time instead of the one facing the direction of the product storage area. This was apparently enough to inspire my supervisor to call into question if I understood the basics of what I was asked to do. This was the first moment when I barked back.
My face went cold and stoic. I wasn’t going to take shots to the kidney anymore. Malcolm X once said, “You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom.”
I asked if my supervisor had any reason to believe that I couldn’t comprehend what was asked of me. Did they think I needed training modules to know how to walk? Do I need to get back on the assembly line and be rewired? If not, they needed to get off my back.
I was, and still am, working the customer service desk. This position requires me and the service team to handle all returns, online orders, phone calls, and a good amount of in-store purchases as well. From a worker’s perspective, there isn’t anything to look forward to. No one comes in with a smile on. The best moment I had early on was an elderly man telling me a joke about a married woman fucking a delivery man for Christmas. She asked her husband what to give their delivery route driver for Christmas. Her husband told her “Ah fuck him. I don’t know. Give him a dollar.” So she fucked him and gave him a dollar.
Outside of the rare infidelity joke, the comings and goings of The Home Depot’s customer service desk is a drag for the working spirit. I feel less human and more like an abandoned dog with nothing but a rusty studded collar and a compass that I can’t read. Every phone call is the same thing. The endless ringing always results in a symphony of complaining and anger. People blame us for their delivery being late. People are pissed that the delivery guy wore shoes inside their house. Something is broken and it’s the fault of whoever was lucky enough to pick up the phone. We are permitted two individual fifteen-minute breaks per shift. Sometimes I sneak away to the lighting department and stare at one of the artificial suns like a gnat. Does one prefer the swatter, the light, or the sugar trap? A lot of times we are as stupid as gnats. Perhaps gnats are smarter than we are. Gnats don’t get bogged down in specifics or spend their lives working to appease bill collectors. Would being a gnat be that bad?
Items are seemingly always out-of-stock and so is my mind. I wander from thought to thought. On the slow days, I sneak in a book and quietly post up at the corner register and read. Silence is somehow too long and too short. During busier days, I salivate for opportunities to escape the desk. I feel like a villain in a shitty spy movie with a trap door button. Instead of “trap”, written in bold is the word “escape”.
I enjoy loading items into the cars of customers. They often apologize for needing my help to load up. I tell them every time that I prefer this over phone calls. I will say, however, that cramming 200+ lb snow blowers into Honda Odysseys is not fun.
Escapism isn’t the only reason I look to the parking lot. From time to time, especially for larger items like snow blowers, floor tiles, lumber, or grills, people will often tip me for my efforts.
Employees at The Home Depot are instructed to not accept any tips. I barely make $100 per shift before taxes and I am not allowed to take $2 or $3 from generous customers after loading their trucks with 500 lbs of rock salt. It makes my blood boil. I am almost certain that the corpse of Jimmy Hoffa is screaming with enough force to shatter both the bags containing the rock salt and the sound barrier. You know, wherever he is.
I take the money and say “thank you” every single time.
So far I’ve discussed the mundane nature of working at The Home Depot. This was what I focused on mostly during the first month or so of my employment. I was caught up in myself and my motivations. It wasn’t until I started interacting with management more that I caught on to the larger concerns surrounding corporate employment.
I was a sedated Minotaur who thought he was trapped by frozen clocks and by Daedalus’ labyrinth. I was fooled by glossy illusions. Walls cannot trap you. They inevitably end. King Minos hired Daedalus to wall off the stairwell leading out of the basement in which I was stored. He was instructed to hand me cups of morphine labeled “water” and to brainwash me. All I had to do was refuse the cup — then the staircase would become as clear as day.
After weaning myself off of the morphine and the light bulbs in Aisle 42, I started assessing what was being asked of me. I started looking at how my success was being measured and what was expected of me. Anyone can scan a barcode. What management wanted from me was to lose individuality and to become an appendage of The Home Depot itself.
They measure how many sold items we record manually vs with the register’s scan gun. I have been told more than once that I never sign customers up for Home Depot credit lines and that I needed to fix that. They don’t want human beings. They want orange robots — flavorless and unimaginative.
Inspired, I began studying my bosses. They are mostly nice enough people, but they’ve consumed more morphine than I have. One of the managers regularly stresses the importance of positive online reviews. We are judged by the clicking of buttons on strangers’ iPhones.
Rather humorously, this same manager, earlier this year, promised that the customer service team would be rewarded if we maintained a 100% positive online review rating for a week straight. I guess we did it because not long afterward we were told that we were to receive our handsome reward in the coming days. I’m not exactly sure what I expected — or what to have expected for that matter. I didn’t think that it would be a Subway sandwich, but it was. Unfortunately, I was not scheduled on the day of our feasting. I might’ve liked tuna salad that afternoon. Oh well.
I was scheduled the following day and I remember that day. My morning began with a soft verbal lashing — the brunt of which was subdued by the mumbling provided by the cloth mask my manager was wearing. We went from a 100% satisfaction rating to a 50% rating. I’d guess that we had received two reviews the previous day — one negative, one positive.
I found this situation amusing. We went from divine grace to the dog house because one person wrote some shitty review. Why on earth should I care what some pissed-off contractor or do-it-yourselfer said about me or another employee? I took the job to get healthcare and to pay my car bill, not to worry myself over the tidings of strangers. The company purposefully keeps me at part-time status, despite my full availability, to prevent me from obtaining benefits. Aren’t I welcome to the same liberties? Can I not decide which customer concerns and reviews I chose to acknowledge? Can I not force those into part-time status?
Roughly a month or so ago, I found myself observing a staff meeting for the first time. It appears that collective morning meetings are a normal practice, but in two and a half months this occurrence was the only one I have encountered. It began with a team stretch. I found myself recalling my Little League practices — except this time I stood on an apathetic ground. In Little League, we could pick our noses or fart and we would laugh about it — as kids do. Here we could only pretend to have life. There was no bounce from cushioned grass or dirt to scribble in. No soul to be felt from the wind. We were ants limbering up to appease the orange queen as much as possible. We weren’t the kids playing anymore. Hell, we weren’t even the bats. Bats were never alive. We were more like leather mitts that only the rich kids’ parents could afford. At one point we were alive, but now we were broken-in tools for a game that we didn’t make the rules for.
Arms over your head. Touch your toes. I can’t reach far enough anymore. Bend one leg back and balance on the other foot. Only a few of us can do that cleanly anymore.
The purpose of the meeting, other than to internally snicker at the balance-impaired among us, was to discuss store sales. New Jersey had just been hit with a few feet of snowfall. Sales were expectedly down that week. This was the management team’s attempt at a rallying battle cry. I remembered Mel Gibson’s “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom” speech from Braveheart.
Unfortunately for the management team, The Home Depot’s fight for capital is less inspiring than William Wallace’s battle for Scotland. There was no comradery. There was, however, loyalty to the machine. We were told that we could bounce back from our underperformance last week. Then the most anti-Wallace statement was breathed into existence. Management looked its underpaid staff in the eyes and said “We expect to sell $110,000 worth of product today.”
Home Depot employees, in New Jersey, start at a wage of $13 per hour. Before taxes, it would take someone 8,461 hours to amass $110,000. That equates to 352.5 days straight — no lunches and no sleep. How uplifting for the worker! I’d sooner look forward to drowning in a vat of acid than to the idea of 8,461 consecutive hours of redirecting phone calls and restocking shelves.
Management, I doubt, could comprehend in the slightest how insane this was in my mind. I drove home that afternoon and delivered a Marxist-style sermon to my passenger seat.
“We toil day after day, and for what? For piecemeal? No, we toil for an orange blob. For the man! For the machine! We gave them $110,000 today and if we are lucky we might get a Subway sandwich! Probably only a 6 in. sub at that! How cruel! How little! We are blocked from healthcare, yet strain our backs lifting the massive boxes that they profit from. We are the grapes to their wine. Without us they have nothing, yet we allow them to have everything and us to have nothing. We are better! Workers of the Depot, UNITE!”
If my management team ever reads this, assuming they don’t fire me, they should let me lead the morning meetings for all of eternity. We’d sell $220,000 worth of product each day. Or, more likely, I’d lead a rebellion and our child-locked box cutters would be replaced with sickles. We already have plenty of hammers in Aisle 13.
Last week, on February 27, I hit a spiritual worker’s wall. This juncture sparked the ultimate “what am I doing here?” moment. Part of my soul died that day. I was not stoned or beheaded, the crime was an even more savage assault: death by credit card sale.
I previously mentioned the company’s desire to enlist new customer credit lines. As a customer service associate opening accounts was part of my expected day-to-day function. You’d likely assume that I don’t give a crap about opening new lines of credit. Nailed it. As someone with student loan debt and no employer-provided healthcare, I hate the word credit. Credit leads to debt. Debt, of any kind, can lead to a bottle, or a pill, or isolation. For some, to the grave. The process of obtaining a credit card is painless and simple, yet its path afterward is contrary.
On February 27, I opened a Home Depot customer credit line for the first time. I don’t remember what the person was buying, but the total came out to around $600. This crushed me. I felt stiff and lackluster. I handed someone a new monthly bill to pay and I was expected to smile about it. Workers are victims of capital debt and I had just become an orange-clothed grim reaper.
The sale itself wasn’t the worst part. I asked one of my coworkers during the transaction for guidance in completing the sale because, as mentioned, I had never finalized one before. My coworker told me that I should make sure that I was personally logged onto the register. They wanted to make sure that the transaction was credited directly to me. Why would I want credit for this? It does me no good. This only helps the billion-dollar company. All I thought about for a moment was how this decision could hurt the schmuck with the new account in the long run.
Maybe an hour or two later, one of the members of the management team strolled up to the service desk. They carried a list with them. I was one of the highlighted names. Being highlighted, as it turned out, meant that you haven’t opened any new lines of credit. This was the second time I had received this lecture. I listened and pretended to care.
My coworker overheard the conversation and spoke up. They told the manager that I had opened a line just a little while ago. This was the worst part. My manager congratulated me. Another manager was about twenty feet away. They came over and congratulated me too. I was disillusioned and grossed out. I was being heralded as if I had graduated college or received a long-overdue promotion. These were not the case. I don’t have a degree and I was still being paid $13. I had just handed someone another thing to worry about. Why was I being celebrated?
I tweeted later that day, “I recently began working for a large corporate retailer. Today someone applied for a store credit card through me. I have never felt less alive.”
I meant it. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how happy the management team was. The sale didn’t affect their lives directly at all. I realized that they were also cogs existing within a larger machine. At this point, their Kool-Aide was easier to sip than mine was. I had consumed a few juice boxes, they had drunk a keg’s-worth. Jesus Christ!
One time I drank an entire bottle of honey-flavored Jack Daniels at Syracuse University. It must have been 2014 or 2015. The next day I couldn’t even keep a bottle of water down. These people were drinking a bottle of orange-flavored whiskey per night. As dirty as capitalism and corporatization are, I can’t help but tip my cap at how effective they are at warping the human mind.
Matt Taibbi once wrote about Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in his book Spanking The Donkey. Taibbi wrote:
“Jobs. Health Insurance. Be a fan of breakfast again. Here’s a question that began bothering me about halfway through the Sleepless Summer tour. If you sell a candidate the same way you sell a cinnamon roll, is the candidate a cinnamon roll?”
Is The Home Depot a cinnamon roll? Are the praises for opening credit lines and the sandwiches a sweet deal, or are they just tasty and fatty distractions that will inevitably give me diabetes and kill me? I don’t know if the icing is even real. It looks too much like grey flooring tiles. Perhaps brass door hinges and light bulbs do constitute a home.
My home is not a complimentary continental breakfast. My coworkers and I may work for The Home Depot, but we are not The Home Depot. My apron may be acidic and sour, but my blood is iron and red.
