I don't know, this has been my experience with employees of all ages at many different large retailers in the US. You'll get the old "we don't have that" at many places. It's not the employees' fault. Employers don't want to pay for their staff to study up on the store layout, or to pay enough to retain people for a long enough tenure that they'd learn it themselves. And the inventory is huge and constantly changing. Meanwhile these people have constant work to do in the shop moving and re-organizing things. Helping customers find things is just one part of it.

It's not the employer's fault either. Customers will choose the store that sells for $1 less, so how can an employer invest in smart, knowledgeable employees when they would lose business to one that uses minimum wage labor?

I went into a Walgreens in San Francisco and asked for an Allen wrench, and nobody on the staff knew what that was. They didn't speak fluent English.

But hey, Walgreens is exactly the type of store your comment applies to. I went into the Macy's flagship store on Union Square to ask for long underwear, and the salesman... didn't know what that was. He didn't speak fluent English either. He did eventually guess "do you mean... thermal?"

At that point I'm pretty comfortable saying it's the employer's fault. A tourist-attracting flagship is not in a cutthroat pricing competition with everyone nearby.

I don't see how that claim can be made unless you know the ins and outs of Macy's cost and revenue structures. Also, from various articles, flagship stores famously lose money due to exorbitant rent and are actually marketing expenses.

Considering the fact that retail store equity prices aren't high growth and they shut more stores than they open, I would bet that they are under considerable pressure to contain costs as people will just shop online or another department store.

The only retail that can afford to pay their employees a professional wage is probably the super high end like Zegna or Hugo and the like.

Found an article talking about Macy's financials: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/business/dealbook/retail-...

There's no way commodity retail that caters to middle and lower class can be profitable with highly paid employees, you just won't move enough product. The fact that there isn't a chain that exists with that model is proof.

> flagship stores famously lose money due to exorbitant rent and are actually marketing expenses

That makes Macy's look much worse; show me the store commercial where a customer walks into the store only to be stymied by the staff's inability to understand the local language.

Not sure what the age and gender of the workers has to do with it?!

Older women working at the cash registers typically don't have the strength to move items around in a trolley full of lumber and giant boxes full of nails or other heavy items which those stores are full of.

One of the local HD's has primarily older women working the registers. Trying to find an SKU so a worker can scan it is a frustrating experience when they are unable to assist.

This is a failure of management. If the women at my local supermarket can get a dedicated bagger, then these stores can have capable employees assisting the cashiers with their duties.

My country is what it is, a place where that demographic of old and female does not have much technical knowledge because society has traditionally discouraged it. So when you see a store with aisles full of tools and building materials overwhelmingly hiring that demographic -- and workers who are indeed unable to help customers much -- it does seem strange and one wonders at the reasons that the company's management has in mind. Are wages so low that only this demographic would accept them? Is it merely an anti-shrink measure? Are profit margins higher on the products (e.g. gardening) that they do know much about?

He explicitly stated it: his observation that people of that particular age and gender make up a large portion of the employees at his local hardware store, and those same workers know "bugger-all" about most of the products on sale.

Also, where do you live where there is a large population of retirement-age women who know lots about home improvement?

Would it have bothered you if he had said "teen-aged males" instead?

Perhaps it's irrelevant to the parent comment, but there is something interesting here about age. In America, lots of retired tradesmen and contractors end up working for Home Depot, and they're the best employee's you'll find there.