Dear Mr. Depot

Dear Mr. Depot,

Recently, in a moment of deep personal misfortune, I found myself at one of your fine outposts here in Oregon. Now I realize that my beloved Oregon is the on the fringes of the rapidly expanding American Empire, and that as a hipster penal colony here on the rain- and- wind-swept Pacific coast, your missives sent by prairie schooner and pony express to your trading posts take a long time to get here, and in fact, may never arrive; I’m sure several of your directives and/or Depot Inspectors are presumed never to arrive, and instead of drafting orders to your navvies they are instead encased in tumbledown piles of broken lumber at the bottom of a Cascade draw, miles below the road they were meant to safely take over the mountains to our humble town of Portland, and so, since you cannot count on reports from your gendarmes – and since the Pinkertons are more concerned with protecting rich folks from climate change than corporate security these days – you will have to content yourself with my report on your fine trading posts’ comport these days.

To wit: I believe I shall do my utmost to not set foot in one of your establishments ever again.

The ordeal began when I found myself wandering your store, looking for all of the various trinkets and tools and items that I required to bootstrap myself up to the requisite number of items to build out a “California Closet” or whatever the hell flippers call them these days, and to build my own ding dang bookshelf like a Real American Man. The shelves that displayed the shelves (meta! And not like Zuck’s new venture that no one uses either. Boom!) were filthy – not unexpected in truth, no sane man expects cleanliness at one of your eponymous Depots, all through the pandemic your stores were the biggest plague pits I ever set foot in – but that filthiness was made all the more obvious by how understocked those shelves were. It took a surprising amount of time to find all the fairly basic materiel required to build out a basic closet, and it’s not like one ever expects someone around to help. But I persevered, I hashtag resisted, and eventually assembled a collection of plastic-coated metal that would allow me to build out the closet of my lover’s dreams.

And then… oh then is when the true ordeal began.

To build my own ding dang bookshelf, I needed a sheet of ¾ birch plywood. You were, of course, perfectly willing to sell me one. However, my personal prairie schooner is an old-ass Jeep Wrangler, and I cannot possibly fit a full sheet of ply in that bad boy. So I needed it cut.

I pushed my orange cart over to the saw, and of course, no one was there. So I started to wander, looking for one of your brand ambassadors or employees or whatever you call them… you probably call them “whiny resources who cost too much and need to be cut,” but I digress. As I looked for someone to call for a saw attendant, another fine gent who needed a forklift operator put his cart behind mine, and also began wandering the filthy wasteland – actually, I’ve gone too far, I like wastelands – looking for a Person With A Radio who might be able to find us someone to operate the saw, and operate the forklift. Soon, another person who needed cuts lined up himself, and we all formed a gang who roamed the postapocalypse of the lumber aisle looking for aid.

Finally, we found a man with a radio. This ordeal has been going on for ten minutes at this point. The man with the radio makes a call, and assures us someone will be there soon. Spoiler alert: another ten minutes go by, and still… no one to make a cut. Our little gang forms up again, and we find The Man With The Radio. He tells us that Matt is the only person who can operate either The Saw or The Forklift, and calls Matt again, and Matt… Matt is nowhere to be seen. However, we know that Matt has been paged, and we head back to our carts, even more frustrated than we were before.

Ten minutes pass, and Magical Mister Mattstopheles is nowhere to be found. Where might he be? We don’t know. The Man With The Radio does not know. No one knows. The Man With The Radio is the only employee we have seen for thirty minutes. Our gang, previously forged in the fires of “what the motherfucking hell is wrong with this place,” splits apart and we go on an epic quest for someone, anyone, ANYTHING to improve this experience. Entire empires have risen and fallen in the time we’ve been waiting for a BASIC FUNCTION OF YOUR STORE. More time passes. My former compatriot who needs the forklift help has descended into madness, and is asking everyone he sees “Are you Matt? Are you Matt? How about you?” Multiple escheria coli generations have doubled the size of their bacterial colonies as we wait. It is feeling as long as the 2016 election. We waited so long I would have had time to leave, get a haircut, eat a three-course lunch, and come back.

But then! Finally! My former compatriot’s asking random people, dogs, koalas, ostriches, trees, shelves, mirrors, the very air and water itself  – whatever he could ask – if they were Matt has borne fruit! Magical Mister Mattstopheles has been found! Where was he? Who knows, and if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, Mr. Depot, because I’m not a narc. Snitches get stitches. Obviously, Matt is not his real name, and no I won’t tell you what store this is, because this is obviously an endemic problem in your entire company, because a week after this horrorshow, I found myself in one of your stores in New Freakin’ Jersey, and had pretty much the same experience. Anyway. My former blood brother whose name I don’t know did the legwork to find Matt and drag him back to his station, so he got the services of The Man With The Forklift first. Honestly, that was a good move on my part, because the only moment of levity in this entire experience happened when Matt clipped another shelf with the forklift, causing a cascade of flimsy black plastic irrigation pipes to disorganize themselves across the empty aisle, and thank god that happened because it gave me back about a tenth of the soulstuff that I lost waiting for someone to operate the saw.

Of course, once he operated the forklift, Matt tried to disappear again. You can be sure that we did not let that happen, not after close to an hour of sitting around in your terrible store, inhaling more scents than are dreamed of in your philosophy (and probably COVID too). Matt cut my sheet of ply, and then I quickly paid and left your store.

Zing! Of course not! Of course that’s not how it went! It took another twenty minutes to check out – our former gang was reunited in line, there were more people who had gathered for a glimpse of sunlight, the single register was staffed by an increasingly harried looking cashier, all the self checkout machines were broken, and, to make matters worse, we had to spend the entire time paying close attention to the dogs in line, who had spent so much time in your store that they were side-eying us and considering going feral.

I didn’t blame them. In fact, I considered joining them.

Anyway, I can picture you now, Mr. Depot, shaking your head sadly and thinking to yourself, “this poor sap writing this letter will be satisfied if I say ‘people just don’t want to work anymore, amirite?” And the answer is No. No I will not be satisfied. Because I know how to use the internet, and I looked it up, and you pay your employees like shit. Your stores are chronically understaffed because you’re a greedy bastard, Mr. Depot, and you’re happy to jack the price of three-quarter ply from $45 to $85 and then nickel and dime your employees until they quit.

I cannot even begin to state the indignity of spending close to one hundred minutes of my Saturday in your store to buy what came down to less than 10 common items, and the fact that you, sir, think you can mollify me by parroting a Fox News talking point about people being lazy frankly enrages me.

Since this horrible experience, I have found another lumber yard, and another hardware store, and as god is my witness, it will be a dry and sunny day in a Portland January before I set foot in one of your stores again. If you wonder what you might do to get more of my hard-earned cash – I suggest spending a bit more of your own and PAYING YOUR EMPLOYEES MORE.

With warmest wishes (for your employees to unionize),

Alex Parise