Dateline, Asheville: What Home Depot is Doing

Sure caught me by surprise

The Home Depot I work at in Asheville NC has had zero customers lately. We’re open: that cruel monster Helene succeeded in getting our store to close for exactly zero minutes. And while we had a lot of customers in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, three weeks later we have almost none.

It makes for a workday that is somehow both profoundly eerie and painfully boring. I have little to do in the store these days besides listlessly wandering through the aisles, going, “This seems like something a Hobbit would buy and then trade away for something else,” or, “Look at all the Milwaukee clothes in this aisle. It’s so weird for a tool company to put out a line of clothing. It’s also weird that we’re now a Nordstrom for construction workers.”

Whereupon, of course, I had to imagine a huge runway show during Fashion Week in Paris, only instead of long limbed models moodily sashaying down the runway, it was just this one scruffy looking dude with a dad bod, sporting a timeworn trucker cap and mud hardened work boots as he hesitantly made his way along the catwalk—and as the rapt fashionistas gazing up at him started wildly applauding, and the paparazzi’s cameras were going off like fireworks all around him, he thought to himself, “Ya know, I do look pretty fuckin’ fly in these unlined bib overalls from Milwaukee’s FREEFLEX collection.”

Then I was back to reality, wondering how long I’d been standing there in aisle 11 staring at the Milwaukee clothes—and remembering that nobody cared because there were less customers in the store than there are penguins in Death Valley.

So you’d think that our parking lot would be equally vacant, right? But it’s not. Instead, every day when I come to work now I have to log in serious time cruising our miles-wide parking lot looking for a space like a drug addict looking for a hit. And I’m usually about that desperate, too, because I am always late to work. Why? Because I can’t seem to get it into my head that so many streets in Asheville are now either gone or impassible that the streets you can drive on are so packed they should temporary rename this city Mashville. (Or Crashville, for that matter: A full month into this—nobody has potable water in their home or business, for instance, and tons of people don’t have their job or their business anymore—people around here are driving even worse than they did BH [Before Helene].)

The reason there are 50 times more cars in the lot than people in the store is because the morning after Helene hit a charity organization called Operation Blessing pulled about six tractor trailers into the area immediately adjacent to our parking lot, where we usually keep endless stacks of mulch, and set up this whole world there, where, all day long, they cook and serve free hot meals for one and all, and offer, free for the taking, countless goods and products that so many people need right now.

So folks drive in from all around these parts to get a good hot meal and pick up stuff they need: blankets, clothes, canned foods, baby formula, diapers, feminine hygiene products, you name it. And where else would they people park but in our lot?

I am never so late to work that I’m not grateful to Operation Blessing for keeping our lot full.

(That said, I’m a long way from crazy about the organization’s name, which is writ large across all of their trucks. I prefer charity given without a side order of sanctimonious condescension. Then again, fuck that. What I want is charitable giving, and if what motivates people to give is their religious faith, then who am I to piss on their desire to communicate that motivation? As long as they give. And it’s not like I could think of a better name for an organization that does what Operation Blessings does. Operation Helping Hands? Kill me now. Operation No Privation? Not bad!—except nine out of ten people would think it’s an organization seeking to deny people privacy—like they’re going to force you to eat your free food in front of an audience. Operation Free Food and Necessities? Oh! So I can come up with a better name than Operation Blessings. I’ll write Pat Robertson and kindly suggest that OB change it’s name. [Yes, OB was founded by that Pat Robertson. On their website, though, it says the organization was founded in 1978 by “businessman and philanthropist, M.G. Robertson.” And that is how I learned that Pat Robertson’s real name is Marion Gordon Robertson.])

This is a trip: While we have about no customers in our store, there sure are a lot of Home Depot workers in our store. And I mean, a lot.

Right after the hurricane hit, Home Depot started sending to our store teams of workers from stores out of state—120-140 of them at a time, coming in waves that last one to two weeks.

They drive these volunteer employees in, put them up at Harrah’s Cherokee Hotel & Casino Resort (in phenomenally beautiful Cherokee, NC, which is a fascinating place in and of itself), and every day those workers pile into vans and drive for an hour to our store, where they work their asses off, while employees like me, who actually do work at our store, mainly try to stay out of their way.

Home Depot immediately sent to our store so many out-of-state workers for two reasons. One is because they figured that we local workers are bound to be so stressed over what has happened to our town and our lives that they genuinely want to relieve us of the additional stress of having to manage our store on our own—especially given how many of our employees might not make it into our store right away, if ever again.

The second reason is that while we may not have many customers in our store right now, that is going to change. As soon as people are done settling with their insurance companies, and lining up the contractors and so they need to get busy putting their homes and businesses back together, we are going to get swamped in a way I know I’ve never experienced before.

I mean, get this: we’re setting up storage pods behind our store to hold all the doors and windows that my Millwork partner and I will soon be ordering—which will be way too many to fit into our store’s receiving area.

Right now we’re just in the quiet before another kind of storm hits.

Meanwhile, you wouldn’t believe our store right now. You know how Home Depots usually have so much Halloween stuff out right now? We did, too. All of that stuff is gone now—and we’ve returned all the Christmas stuff we’d already gotten in, too. No Christmas for our store this year. Where all that stuff would usually be are all the things people around here are going to need, for a long time now, to repair their homes and businesses: flooring, mold spray, dehumidifiers, shovels, buckets, tarps, hazmat suits, and on and on and on.

Here is some of what the whole front of our store looks like right now:

Not so much with the Halloween! But here for a much scarier reason.

Revamping our entire store—and dealing with the enormous quantities of products now coming into it that are necessary and specific to our area—is a major undertaking.

Hence, the hordes of my new co-workers.

Man. The store I returned to after being away for six weeks is not the store I left.

Three more things about Life at Home Depot after Helene:

1. Home Depot is feeding us two hot delicious meals, twice a day, seven days a week. There’s always an entree, a vegetable dish, and a great dessert waiting for us in the break room. It’s astounding—and beyond welcomed at a time when nobody is cooking at home because of the bad water situation. And we’re encouraged to use the take-out boxes they give us to take all the food we want back to our families.

2. They’ve offered us, for free, to take whenever we want, unlimited amounts of every kind of supply you can imagine: blankets of every kind, hats, sweatshirts, regular shirts, sweatshirts, sweaters, socks, just about anything you’d find in your bathroom : our whole back room is basically a Wal-Mart, with everything free to all employees, no questions asked It’s unbelievable.

3. From the day after Helene hit until the end of the year, full-time employees at my store are being paid an extra $200 a week, part-timers an extra $100.

I don’t mean to bore you with all this stuff about my job. I’m only meaning it to show just one tiny part of what’s happened to normal life in this town.

Real quick, about the money so many of you entrusted me to use to help others in this area: I’m finding out more about that tomorrow.* My wife Cat and I wanted to find people who, for whatever reason, couldn’t avail themselves of the kind of help FEMA and insurance companies are so readily making available to so many. (By the way, anyone who tells you that FEMA isn’t bringing major relief to many thousands of people all throughout this area has no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. You know what really fucked up people trying to get FEMA assistance? When Trump came to town. If he’d have flown over the area, like Biden and Harris did, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But instead his giant motorcade froze traffic everywhere in this town, for hours on end, when so many people were desperately trying to meet with their FEMA representative, or to get to their doctor, or to pick up their children. It was just unbelievable. It was so, so cruel.)

All right, my boss just called to ask if I could come in early today. It’s starting, I know. So I won’t have time to proofread the above; forgive any of the certain fuck-ups you’ll find. Talk to you soon. All my love to you and yours, and I’m sure not kidding about that.

Next time I want to tell you about how this whole thing that’s happened here in Asheville has kind of . . . wrecked my brain, basically. Love you. John

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*If you’d like to donate to this effort, Venmo me at Norman-Shore-1 or john@johnshore.com; or PayPal me at john@johnshore.com