Locally, right now, it's hard to find ANYONE in the local Home Depot or Lowe's stores who actually works there. The registers have a skeleton crew, there's basically no one "helping" in the aisles, and usually only 1 or 2 people at the customer service and online order pickup desk.

The people you are able to find seem to be brand new at the job and are basically useless, even for simple things like getting the right online order picked from the shelf behind them as they have no idea what the organizational system is.

It's not just that you have to pay someone to do this, you have to be able to simply hire a warm body, and right now that seems horribly hard in retail where I am.

No surprise there, construction is booming ... why take a low paying side job when you can make more doing what you know.

Costco manages it just fine. Want an iPad or iMac? Take the cardboard sheet and hand it to the cashier. Granted, Costco is always staffed, but it is possible.