Learning Adventures at Home Depot

Just getting back from Hawaii, visiting my aging mom.

She asked me to run her by Home Depot to pick up a few succulents and some potting soil, which I didn’t mind doing even though I personally don’t spend a dime there because of their enormous support for Trump.

Here’s something I learned about Home Depot as a representative of a large class of corporate employers, and the socioeconomics of our times. Since the pandemic, they have lost 100 employees–in that one store alone, on Kauai, Hawaii.

Now they’re hiring, but the only job offerings are part-time, perhaps 20 hours per week, enabling them so they can avoid paying any worker benefits. They don’t want one fulltime employee who will enjoy a secure position; they want two part time workers both of whom they can oppress with pending starvation.

These employees will be working 20 hours per week X 4 weeks/month X perhaps $15 per hour = $1200 per month minus taxes, where monthly rents for a room in a shared house are maybe $1000.

Enter the world of disinformation where the narrative here is “No one wants to work anymore.” We’ve all heard it.

One needs to congratulate the corporate world for its unbridled success in PR here. They’re starving their employees, while making it appear that the problem is the worker’s laziness. Kudos.