Home Depot employee Kevin Walsh (@kevinwalsh539) is fed up with some of the questions that he gets asked while on shift for the retailer, so he decided to lampoon them in a viral TikTok video.
Walsh’s clip has earned a whopping 6.9 million views, and a myriad of viewers responded with expressions of relatable sympathy, along with some of their own, personal customer gripes.
The first scenario displays how Walsh responds to customers who ask for discounts on damaged items.
“Excuse me, can I get a discount on this it’s chipped?” Walsh, roleplaying as the customer, asks.
“Dude honest you can steal it for all I care,” he responds as his Home Depot employee self.
“Yeah but isn’t that illegal?” the customer asks.
“Listen I gotta go take a sh*t,” the worker says before walking off camera.
Another scenario featured in the video sports a similar setup. Walsh, acting as a customer, approaches the same employee with a query: “Excuse me do you guys have any wood?”
“Uhh, yeah let me go check,” he tells the man before looking at a massive shelf filled with different cuts of wood: “Yeah, we do, you blind f*ck. Open your eyes.”
“Thank you,” the patron responds.
The third scenario shows the customer stopping the Home Depot employee mid-stride to inquire about something while in the gardening section of the store. “Do you guys sell any petunias?” the customer asks.
“This isn’t my department, dumba**,” Walsh responds.
“Yeah but you work here, right?” the customer questions.
“Yeah, that doesn’t make me a florist,” he claps back. “Just because you got those dirty-a** Vans on that doesn’t make you a skater.”
The clip then transitions to another situation set in the retailer’s toilet section.
“Excuse me do you mind if I try one of these out?” the customer asks the worker, who, like every other part of the video, provides a very sarcastic response.
“Yeah, let me get you a ladder. You want to take a test sh*t?” Walsh says.
The TikToker joked in a caption for the video that Home Depot management didn’t seem to appreciate his blunt and caustic retorts to shoppers. “Got a new job and lost it the same day,” he wrote.
Several commenters also seemed to have their problems with customers constantly bombarding them with questions they thought were either thoughtless, inconsiderate, ill-informed, or just plain dumb. h
“The department thing is so real,” one wrote.
Another said, “As a home depot employee i’ve never laughed so hard.”
Some folks shared their own most hated questions in the comments section.
“‘Do you work here?’ ‘No I wear this company shirt to the store for shits and giggles,’” one joked.
@kevinwalsh539 Got a new job and lost it the same day 😭 #workinginretail #keepingitreal ♬ original sound – Kev Walsh
A further TikTok user proposed a Purge-style day where employees were given the ability to speak freely to shoppers without fear of losing their job: “I vote one day a year retail workers should be allowed to say whatever they want without consequence lol.”
While many of the questions presented in Walsh’s video are those proposed more out of what seems like thoughtlessness or a lack of understanding of Home Depot’s retail structure, there’s research that indicates rude consumer behaviors are a key reason as to why many employees are leaving their jobs.
Business Insider is one of several outlets that posted about a spike in “rude” customers all over the country, resulting in throngs of fed-up workers who decided to hand in their pink slips. “Some retail and restaurant workers say abusive customers are one of the main reasons they quit retail work. Many won’t return to the industry,” the outlet wrote in 2021.
Spiceworks penned that a year later, there were still employees hitting the road in the hopes of finding greener labor pastures because of “toxic client[s].”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Walsh and Home Depot via email for further information.
