What I'd expect is what Mr. Langone, 82-year old co-founder of Home Depot and subject of the CNBC story linked here, claims about Home Depot's associates, as related in ancestor post:
> Home Depot had ... associates who are knowledgeable about the products, says Langone. "These people learned their business and, to this day, the heart and soul of the Home Depot are these 400,000 people that work in the stores," Langone says.
Sure, I know exactly what I'm looking for. But I don't know where to find it. I'd expect the heart and soul of Home Depot to know this.
A salient HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260911
If I wanted in depth knowledge of how to do a particular job, I wouldn't be asking in a large DIY shop, I'd be asking someone who knows, such as someone at a small DIY shop who has earned their stripes or a professional tradie.
And if I had in depth knowledge of how to do a particular job, I wouldn't be working at a large DIY shop pointing customers (or not, as the case often is) to where they can find M4 wood screws.
Nobody. You're mischaracterizing my point of view.
As others have pointed out, I'm not expecting that minimum wage Home Depot employees have in-depth knowledge; rather, I'd expect them to have enough knowledge of their own inventory to be able to point my in the right direction for specific(and often common) products in their massive store. Sure, I could always just go to a certain department, and I usually do, but there are often products that are on a shelf in a different department than one might think.
Yes, I have the expectation that the employees reduce the friction in customers spending money. At Home Depot, this rarely happens in my experience. Yet Orchard Supply Hardware, ACE, and even Lowes are a very different story.
By the way, I'm not blaming the employees. I'm blaming the company.
And yes, you do need to have some in-depth knowledge to even know what something is before you know where to find it. I guess the question is what do you expect them to lookup information by? Product names? That's pretty hard. Product type? Well anything beyond a simple category like "bathroom" is going to require knowledge, and it quickly crosses over the line of capabilities they're paid for.
There's certainly validity to your argument, and my point is that employees do need surface-level knowledge about general product categories in their store, which we both agree upon. In my previous posts, part of my gripe with Home Depot is their employees often fail to be helpful in finding basic items that aren't of specific brands. For instance, those stick-on felt nubs used on cabinets can be in any upwards of 3 aisles dedicated to cabinets, drawers, shelves, etc. It would save me time for an employee to remember where the shelf space is for those type of products.
I'd be happy if they could do this even 50% of the time. I'm not expecting perfection. At any given Home Depot I've been to, I've only gotten actual help about 5% of the time. Contrast that with almost any other hardware store, including ones of equivalent size, and it's a different story. Even the employees of Lowes are of better assistance. Orchard Supply Hardware is even better, although their stores are smaller. This doesn't even stop at grocery stores; employees at Target, Walmart, and various grocery stores are more helpful in my experience and know about their inventory to a greater extent than those at Home Depot.
I don't know exactly how other stores like Lowes manages to improve this customer-employee interaction, but if I were running Home Depot in optimal conditions, I would create incentives for employees to familiarize themselves with products and various product categories. If they could make it to optional trainings, watch short videos, be of help to pretend customers, pass quizzes, all of which are voluntary and are not included on an employee's performance record, they could see raises and other benefits. But I've never been an employer, so I don't know how well that would work in practice. I also have no idea if Home Depot doesn't already do these things to any meaningful degree.
It may seem like I'm ranting and raving about Home Depot, but that's only because I don't think my expectation that employees should be paid to do something kinda hard isn't an unreasonable one. Unless they're stocking shelves or helping me cut wood, I can't see their presence to be of value. Better signage and promotion of their mobile app(which I only learned of today) could easily replace these employees, and probably will once the next economic downturn hits.
Well in their examples it's about actually finding the item in the store, rather than working out what to buy.
That doesn't help if you can't find the product on the web site or don't know what to use, but if you just want to know where 1/2" copper elbows are, the site will get you within 6 feet of them.
I basically shop at Home Depot from home and then go to the store and pick the items from the bins. The mobile app works well if you're already in the store.
The only reason I don't just buy stuff from Amazon is because I happen to live close to a Home Depot, and a) I want the items now, b) I want to see the items before I buy them, especially because c) there is a high probability I'll want to return at least one thing I buy, and that's way easier at a brick-and-mortar.