True stories of miserable Home Depot employees (2023)

Ken Langone, who made his billions as a Home Depot financier, has a new oneBuchentitled "I Love Capitalism". Last week,we askedfor real Home Depot employees to tell us if their job makes them love capitalism. The response was overwhelming.

Over the weekend, I received well over 100 emails from current and former Home Depot employees. We will be sending excerpts of these emails in several installments over the coming days. These are simply intended to give Home Depot employees the opportunity to share their own experiences within the company. Just like Ken Langone.

No tip

I worked at Home Depot in 2001 and my main job was loading at the contractor's register. That meant large amounts of cement, lumber, drywall, etc. They strictly forbade me from accepting tips from the contractors I was helping. I was told that if I was caught taking a tip I would be fired on the spot. The pay sucked and they had a policy where if you had an accident at work you were taken straight to a drug screening which was all well and good except it was very selective... I only worked there a few months and I quit when my manager made it difficult for me to take $10 from a guy who needed help loading several thousand pounds of landscape rocks into his truck on a muggy July day in Virginia.

Fuck home depot.

(Video) don't move!!!!!! #squidgame

A climate of success

The climate controls for all Home Depots in the US are controlled from a central location, and the only store thermostat is at the GM's office, so the store air doesn't come on unless it gets over 80 in most areas. The central one Management wouldn't do anything, so in the summer the manager put a heat lamp on the thermostat to get the air conditioning to come on.

The only people I spoke to who enjoyed working there were guys who hid in back rooms and closets to watch movies at every opportunity. No one cared enough to do their job. When I started there was a quarter inch layer of dust on all the tool rental shelves and there were many tools that were "out of order" because no one felt like cleaning them...

It certainly didn't feel like the grand ideal of capitalism at work.

The positive

I wholeheartedly agree with Home Depots' belief that the customer always comes first. That and her leadership make her so successful. I'm going into my eleventh year there and even at 75 I still don't feel like retiring.

I work in the corporate office and it's by far the best job I've ever had. I feel absolutely respected and empowered for my own career. In less than 5 months I've met countless people who started out as part-time cashiers or clerks and are now in high-level positions... All retail at the store level sucks, but the store associates I've worked with seem happy too be as possible.

Anyone can find negative things about any business or company. In my eyes and Living the Orange Home Depot is a good company to hire.

Humiliating

I worked part-time at Home Depot [in Tennessee] on and off in 2013 and 2014. During our induction and training, we were shown several videos, which I would describe as anti-union, explaining that management cares about employees and that if we ever had any concerns about the workplace, we should go to them. My takeaway from this whole experience is that they wanted us to report disagreements or dissatisfaction among our "employees".

The job itself was pretty awful. I was paid $8.25 to bring shopping carts out of the parking lot and load customer cars. I would do just that rain or shine, hot or cold. Managers also had an odd attitude towards employees who were sedentary at work. If they caught someone sitting down, that person quickly ended up on management's shit list. While working there, it was a regular occurrence that I would come home with sore, blistered performance. Sometimes I could hardly walk after a long shift. I'm not in the best shape, but I really sympathize with the older or overweight colleagues. I heard many employees share strategies for managing chronic pain. Most would take large doses of over-the-counter pain relievers, but I wouldn't be surprised if others resorted to more extreme methods of pain management. The store was consistently understaffed and employee turnover was very high (I can't imagine why!) which really added to the strain on the staff who were there.

In general, I found working there to be an exceptionally humiliating experience.

baptism of fire

I've worked at Home Depot for a year and a half and I'm 19. Here's my story at Home Depot: I started at 18, having just graduated from high school. I've been working at Zaxbys for 6 months and was looking for something that could give me more hours. I got the job and they assigned me to the flooring department which also includes moving boxes, storage boxes, blinds and blinds. After a week and a half of online training that taught me very little, I went to the sales and storage area. Being only 18 years old I had no experience with flooring and I was wrong in assuming management would teach me how. They do their baptism of fire in the home depot. Eventually I just started researching how to do flooring and tiling myself so I wouldn't look like an idiot when the client expects an answer and I'm the guy who should know. Clients expect expert advice, but the pay that Baudepot offers is not enough to attract the experts. The only experts in the building are the retired contractors who just want to do something with their free time...

6 months after being a specialist I was told I was going to switch to home appliances. So I did. Our home appliance delivery company blows honestly. They often deliver broken equipment, the wrong equipment, and sometimes they refuse to install it. So when an angry customer calls, I'm the one to answer the phone. Hearing phone calls at work is stressing me out now. I told the management team that I wanted to go back to flooring and after a few weeks I did. For fun, I decided to look around at what kind of jobs I could get as a biology student. I noticed that most jobs require lab experience, so I looked for entry-level lab jobs. I asked my ASM for a recommendation and he gave me his information. I was then approached by management and asked if I plan to stay at Home Depot and move up or study biology, I'm not kidding...

Oh yeah, that tax plan that supposedly made Home Depots employees $1,000? Only employees who had worked there for 20 years received $1000, which was taxed. I received "$200" which was actually $120 after taxes.

hell

I don't know if you've read Dante Inferno, but I'm convinced Home Depot is one of the planes of Hell!! I worked for them for 10 years, it's a terrible place! ! I have a 401k that I have invested money in for 9 years. All I have in it is just the principle! Account maintenance fees eat up my hard-earned savings. I've been there so long I'm so beat up I feel like an abused wife. I don't have the confidence to look for another job. Tried to get promoted, worked so hard, interviewed over 15 times, never got promoted and never told why!! I chose the person who had no experience and was always lazy. Through hard work, you know where in the depot.

The Garden of Eden

Yes, I work in the garden department at home. I like my job in a way, it's the best I've ever had. In others, it's the hell of a job I water in the parking lot for eight hours every day in 90-100 degree heat.

I like my colleagues very much and do my best to work with them. Our values ​​are very strong at Home Depot. I will never get rich working here. I'll never have a career I'm too old, there's not much time left. I don't have a 401k but if I had started younger I would have.

I feel like a corporate slave some days, but that's true of most today. However, most people don't go into just any business and become as rich as Langone. So does capitalism work? No. Not like it used to be in his time or my father's.

Still, I'm grateful to have a job in the toughest department at Heimdepot Garden Center.

Lol

If you want your back to hurt and your feet to hurt, have ASMs (Assistant Store Managers) pretend to take care of you and enjoy the work for $11.00 an hour, then we have a job for you. lol HomeDepot is a revolving door of employees. I have seen every single employee who comes to HD with such enthusiasm, excitement and friendliness that on their one year anniversary when they receive their first raise of literally 0.25 cents they realize that this is a terrible place to work. Half the people I work with donate plasma every week so they can afford food. It's heartbreaking. On the plus side, if you're a retiree who doesn't really need a lot of money and only works 16 hours a week then this is the place for you.

We will be sending out more employee emails from Home Depot in the coming days. If you are a current or former Home Depot employee and would like to share your work history there, you can do soemail me.