Home Depot: Part 1
I’d say an important moment in my character arc was Home Depot.
I started working at Home Depot as a cashier. There were very clear goals to meet. Get credit cards. Get Extended Protection Plans. Open every item and look inside of it. Ring everything up separately.
I got credit cards. I got extended protection plans. I got high scores on the VOC (the customer survey at the bottom of the receipt).
I liked being a cashier because I got to talk to people all day and whenever I started to feel like I was really bad at my job, there were my VOC scores.
Some customers couldn’t be pleased no matter what and I always found this upsetting. Some would come in ready for a fight.
A lot of days I worked the returns desk. I liked working returns because the ASMs told me I was good at it.
There was only one ASM who didn’t stop to tell me what a good job I was doing.
I’ll tell you about that ASM.
See I’d been working at Home Depot for two weeks and I was already covering the returns desk. In between customers, I would keep the desk clean. I’d bring carts of stuff back to the RTV area. I’d bring trash back. So I was doing that and this ASM stopped me. He stopped me by raising his voice at me, yelling, “Hey! Stop right there!”
And so I stopped and glaring at me, he said, “Do you know what FIRST stands for?”
I was able to name all the letters in the acronym except for R. I forgot that R stood for Respect, but give me a break, I’d worked there for two weeks.
He snapped the word “respect” at me and then said, “Do you know that you’re supposed to greet every customer?”
I said, “Oh…even when I’m just bringing RTVs back? I thought they’d need me to get back up to the desk as soon as possible.”
At this point in time, I was so confused about when I was and wasn’t supposed to stop and greet customers. At first I’d thought I was literally supposed to greet every single customer, but a few days earlier, I’d been walking back up to the front end from my lunch break. I greeted a customer in electrical (which was the department you had to walk through to get to the timeclock). They needed help with something, so I spent the next 5 minutes tracking down an electrical associate to help them. When I got to the front end 5 minutes late, the head cashier was frantic. She’d already paged me 5x and without letting me explain, she launched into a lecture about how I only had a 30 minute lunch. There was another cashier standing there smirking at me the whole time. The most explanation I could get out was “Listen, I clocked back in right at 10:42-” and she cut me off to say, “Look at what time it is. Just clock back in on time tomorrow.”
So then this assistant store manager was angrily demanding to know why I was going back and forth not greeting every customer. After that altercation with the head cashier, I’d decided what I was supposed to do was greet customers while I was at my register, saying hi to them as they passed and I was waiting for my next person to check out.
I tried to clarify this with the ASM. I was nervous, because he looked so mad and he was yelling at me and I’d thought I was doing everything the way I was supposed to be doing it. But I pushed through my nerves and said, “I thought I was only supposed to do that up at the register. Am I supposed to greet customers when I’m walking from one place to another too?”
And he snapped, “Obviously. I don’t want to see you ignoring customers again.”
Then he walked away.
Another time a customer came in without a receipt and I had to give him a store credit. Without a receipt, the only money customers get back is the lowest sales price within the last 90 days and without the sales tax (this was NH, so usually there was no sales tax, but every once in awhile we’d get a customer from a Massachusetts store who made a fuss about it). The customer wanted to know why he wasn’t getting back what he paid and I explained to him how returns worked without a receipt.
Fifteen minutes or so later, the customer came back over and he had that same ASM with him. The ASM thrust the item into my hand and snapped “How much is this?”
I scanned it and told him the price.
He practically threw the receipt at me and demanded, “Then why did you only give him [x-amount] back?”
I started to explain how store credits work, but he interrupted me, sounding even more annoyed and told me to give him the man the right amount of money back.
I tried maybe two more times to explain and he kept interrupting me.
I sort of froze at that point. I just stopped and stared at the computer screen. I could feel that I was going to cry out of frustration and embarrassment.
Maybe the ASM could tell that too, because he said, “No, go ahead. What were you gonna say?” And he still sounded plenty annoyed, but he did actually let me finish talking that time.
I said, “This is how store credits work. Without a receipt, the register will only give him back the lowest sales price. It doesn’t matter what the price is now.”
He snapped, “Well, I’m telling you to give the man back what it costs now.”
I handed the receipt over to him and said quietly, still trying not to cry, “I don’t know how to do that. Will you show me?”
“Get out of the way. I’ll do it.”
But of course, he couldn’t do it. The register doesn’t work that way, or at least it didn’t back then, back in 2011.
He brought the customer over to the service desk DH and she told him the same thing that I did.
He never apologized to me for throwing me under the bus in front of the customer like that, for yelling at me, while all the customers waiting at the desk stared at me, and then they all assumed I didn’t know what I was doing and every single one of them was impatient and snapped at me when it was their turn to be helped. He never said he was sorry.
Two years later, after that man had transferred to another store, and I’d never had any interactions with him other than those two interactions, I’d been promoted to COS and I had a little office in the back of the store that I shared with two other people. I came into work one morning and my two coworkers were talking about this ASM.
“Jen, do you remember Tim? He used to be an ASM here.”
“Oh yeah, bald guy right?”
“That’s him.”
“What an asshole. I hope I never see that guy again.”
There was an awkward pause. Both my coworkers looked at each other.
“What?”
“He…died.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
I sat down and went to work.
I know how that conversation made me look. How I was supposed to backtrack, pretend I hadn’t meant it, pretend the man had actually been a saint. But I didn’t.
Everyone else sainted him postmortem. I didn’t want to pretend he was anything other than an asshole who died.
