I was just thinking about this myself, having recently had to spend exorbitant times waiting in line at both my local Sprint store and a Best Buy. It does seem like this is a problem that isn't specific to Home Depot (where I've had to wait in long lines as well); it's more a problem that seems to be metastasizing across all sorts of big retail.
My suspicion is that it has something to do with the jobs these companies offer being increasingly precarious, poorly trained and ill-paid. Corporate America has spent decades striving to get to a point where workers can be treated as interchangeable widgets, swapped around at will and just discarded when they wear out. Well, they got there, and now we discover that when you build an entire culture around treating people without respect they don't have a lot of respect for you or the job you're asking them to do either.
Workers in the old Soviet Union supposedly had a joke: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." It's not hard to imagine someone working first-line customer support at a big box store saying the same thing.
My suspicion is that it has something to do with the jobs these companies offer being increasingly precarious, poorly trained and ill-paid. Corporate America has spent decades striving to get to a point where workers can be treated as interchangeable widgets, swapped around at will and just discarded when they wear out. Well, they got there, and now we discover that when you build an entire culture around treating people without respect they don't have a lot of respect for you or the job you're asking them to do either.
Workers in the old Soviet Union supposedly had a joke: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." It's not hard to imagine someone working first-line customer support at a big box store saying the same thing.