‘Whose rent is $750 a month?’: Home Depot employee shows what company says workers should be spending on rent, food
How out of touch is the management at Home Depot? According to many, very.
One worker of the home improvement chain revealed a chart that advised how workers can budget their pay. And Home Depot employees were not having it.
In a viral Reddit post uploaded to the r/HomeDepot subreddit, user u/RealHuashan shared a photo of a chart displayed on a screen. Titled “Suggested Amounts,” the chart declared the following:
- Take Home Pay: $2,500
- Mortgage/Rent: $750 (30%)
- Transportation: $375 (15%)
- Financial Fuel: $250 (10%)
- For Everything Else: $1,125 (45%)
The Redditor captioned the post, “Home Depot official budget is insane.”
“How many of y’all are making $2,500 take home?” they wrote. “And whose rent is $750 a month? I pay $1895.”
‘Out of touch’
u/RealHuashan wasn’t the only worker miffed by the insulting chart. The majority of the 400-plus comments, as of writing, flamed Home Depot for missing the mark.
“When I see numbers like these posted up by some billion-dollar company, I can’t help but ask myself, are these people so out of touch that they seriously have no idea what things cost?” one user wrote. “Or, more than likely, do they post those numbers in an effort to make their employees feel like it’s their fault they can’t keep that sort of budget?”
A reply to that comment, which received an award, wrote that this is “100% to counter the rhetoric that leads to unionizing.”
One commenter accused Home Depot of delusion, while another demanded to know just what the heck was “financial fuel?”
“It’s their buzzword for money set aside to grow your personal wealth,” a user replied. “Money invested, or into a 401k or what have you.”
A Redditor chastised the company for including “THAT, but not utilities?? Get a grip.”
Several Redditors argued over whether this was monthly or bi-weekly take-home pay, but regardless, everyone could agree on one thing: There’s no way rent is $750.
“The last time my rent was anywhere near $750 was in 1996,” a user said. Turns out, that user wasn’t too far off.
How much was rent in the ‘90s compared to now?
A NASDAQ report shared that the median rent for an unfurnished one-bedroom in the U.S. was around $600 in the ‘90s. Today, that number has skyrocketed to around $1,800. However, the average Home Depot pay for hourly workers remains at $15 for sales associates. This means their monthly pay, before taxes, would still be less than the take-home pay shown in the Reddit post’s chart. For someone to take home $2,500, their gross pay would have to be enough so taxes, insurance, and other withholdings can be deducted.
One Home Depot user illustrated how impossible that is, commenting, “AS a Full TIME Associate my take home pay is nowhere near $2,500 a month maybe $2,000 a month, at $16.00 hr.”
Another said they quit their job for this same reason: “I recently left my job at Home Depot because of the slow pay increases not keeping up with the inflation of my rent and other bills.”
According to Indeed, the only non-executive position that would be around $40 an hour is Shipping Supervisor. Everyone else would make between $14 to $25.
This makes it easy to understand why more than 1,400 people were angered by u/RealHuashan’s post. As one user put it, “It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care.”
The Mary Sue reached out to Home Depot for comment via email and to the Redditor via direct message.
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