The Home Depot: You Can Do It, We'll Steal if From You

March 1st, 2009

You know what I find amazing? It’s incredible that big box retailers like The Home Depot are still in business.
I have a new motto for my one-time employer: “You can do it, we’ll steal it from you.” And this from a company which fires people for stopping those who steal!
I was promoted to a position as the supervisor over lumber, building materials and millworks at Home Depot 1853 in League City, Texas, only a couple of days before Hurricane Ike hit Houston. In the months following the storm, my departments accounted for nearly half the $9 million profit above and beyond sales plan the store raked in, and even after the closer-to-impact Galveston and Clear Lake Shores stores re-opened, our store was still doing three times the business in my departments that it had been doing before the storm up to Feb. 18, the day I walked out.
In spite of all that, our store never rated any more man-hours in my departments than it had rated before the storm – meaning that very often, I and the associates I supervised often worked one-man shifts in the very labor-intensive end of the building.
Nonetheless, I was looking forward to a very hefty bonus check for all my hard work in the fourth quarter of FY2008. By my reckoning, it was to be in the neighborhood of $2,500. But now I’m not going to get it; instead, some corporate executive who’s never broken a sweat gets it — all because I took care of my customers.
On Feb. 18, you see, I’d pulled the mid-shift, meaning that the moment I came on my opening man was scheduled to go to lunch. Immediately, I was inundated with requests to help customers get this and that. It’s amazing how many people have bad backs and can’t lift anything these days, especially if they need bags of concrete.
One customer, however, needed an entire bundle (240) of fence pickets. Because of the large quantity, we kept the bundles in an area by the Garden Center on the other side of the building. I would need a forklift to get them. I sent the customer to the Garden Center to await my arrival, hopped on the forklift, and got on the radio to call for a spotter.
Now, The Home Depot believes in safety. They fire people for stopping shoplifters because they’re scared someone might hurt the shoplifter. And I knew that in order to move that forklift, I needed to have a spotter out there with orange flags to wave off people who might foolishly walk in front of me without my seeing them.
(Believe it or not, there really are people like that.)
So I got on my radio and called for help. I called a second time. I called a third time. I got on my department’s mobile phone and broadcast over the store loudspeaker that I needed help on the forklift.
No one showed. I called on the radio again. I called on the phone again. I called on the radio again. Finally, I went inside and corralled a cashier who was headed for the break room, and got her to spot me to the “safe zone” beside the building, where I could safely move around the building with no spotter needed.
While I drove around the building, I called on the radio twice more for someone to please, please meet me at the garden center entrance to spot me. When I arrived at that location, there was no one there and no one had even acknowledged my radio call. My customer was waiting for his fence pickets and getting anxious.
So I did what The Home Depot urges its associates to do – I rendered great customer service by taking my forklift and getting the man his pickets.
As I got my customer loaded up, two members of our “safety team” walked out the door and right past us. Then the store manager came out and asked where my spotter was. I told him I didn’t have one, despite repeated calls. He let me know that well, this was a serious safety violation and they’d just have to pull my license.
Whether or not the customer was a happy camper was a secondary consideration – after all, if some car racing through the parking lot hit my forklift instead of my spotter, well, the customer’s car would be totaled and they’d sue us. Can’t have that. Can we?
So I handed the store manager my lift license, I walked straight back to the break room, removed my work apron and called out on the radio my best wishes to all those I’d worked with all these long months. Then I walked out.
A day later, one of our assistant managers called me on the phone and asked if I’d come back in to discuss whether I really wanted to quit or not, that maybe we could work out something where I’d step down as department head and where my lack of a lift license wouldn’t matter. I reluctantly agreed.
We sat down in the store manager’s office and I read a statement about why I’d operated the forklift without a spotter – namely, because The Home Depot failed to provide adequate staffing – and why I’d walked out. I said I didn’t feel it was right to rigidly enforce the rules in that situation while it took weeks and months to get rid of people who made a habit of not showing up for work.
The store manager and assistant thanked me … then fired me. I was told the decision to terminate had been made at the district level BEFORE our meeting began. In other words, I was lured back to the store so that they could establish that THEY initiated the termination for a “conduct” violation, thus making me ineligible for re-hire – and ineligible for hire almost anywhere else, too.
In addition, that made it possible for The Home Depot to claim I was not “an associate in good standing,” and thus ineligible for the bonus I’d worked so very, very hard to earn. My bonus will be distributed to some deserving senior management person — probably the district staff which proved so effective at establishing the situation which led to my alleged “safety violation.”
I guess this is all my fault. I cared. I actually believed the schtick that customer service was my number one job, and I believed what our district manager uttered in the single class I’d been given on how to run a department, that “I’ve never fired anyone for taking care of a customer.”
Well, you have now, Sean. Hope you enjoy my money.