I worked as a Race Track Manager at The Home Depot and many call it Home Depot when there really is a ‘The’ at the beginning, it’s on the logo. And as a Race Track Manager, I wore a vest while the rest of my coworkers wore aprons like 1950s housewives.
When the holidays came around, The Home Depot had to be holiday centric because our customers covered the gamut with regard to religion. This was especially true of the store I was managing as 1/3 of our customers were Haitian, 1/3 were Hassidic Jewish, and 1/2 were Spanish and White.
It’s not like the last group was both Spanish and White; it could have been that the Spanish were 3/8 of the group while the Whites were the remaining 3/8. And it’s not like White is an actual thing and I guess the politically correct term is Caucasian, if I was politically correct, and it’s not like Caucasian is an actual thing. And I would just like to say that Spanish and White makes me think of omelets and if a Spanish White omelet was on the menu, I would order it every time.
Some would consider me Caucasian but I’m not actually from the Caucus mountains and I have no desire to one day get back to the motherland. At The Home Depot, we were all inclusive and a typical Home Depot The Home Depot poster would have and old black man with a white beard and suspenders, a Chinese teenage girl, a white girl in her 20s, and a black man in his 30s. I’m convinced the only time this group of people were ever in the same place is on a The Home Depot (THD) poster, and it was more than likely Photoshopped.
For the holidays, The Home Depot liked to embrace all of its customers and I never really cared what someone’s religion, race or gender are; jerkwads are jerkwads no matter their attributes. Around the holidays, The Home Depot wanted to be ultra-inclusive, even though they only sold Christmas decorations which included Christmas trees, lights, reindeer, and tree decorations. There were no menorahs or Stars of David, but there was a holiday decoration no one, not even THD’s top brass, ever suspected we sold. And since Festivus is the all-inclusive holiday, just as long as you have strength and grievances, I thought it should be represented.
THD has a bunch of different sizing convention and styles of display signs to fit every situation in THD. Every store has a sign station with markers, bigger markers, and even paint-brushy things in every shape and size to fit all sign making needs. There are also various blank signs and we would use them on endcaps to say things like “Floor Tiles - $1 a square gallon” and for register tops: “Sharpies $0.99 each with purchase of a generator” and for wingstacks with “Great Stuff is great stuff for sealing cracks and gaps, not those though.”
The smallest of these signs was called a significantly small sign, 3s fr shrt, and the largest of these signs was a BMFS. It wasn’t in any official THD literature and it wasn’t covered in our SOP or our POS or CSVs or SKUs. But if you asked for a BMFS in any THD, they would bring you this large size that must’ve been 3’ x 2’. And BMFS literally stood for ‘Big Mother F&%^ing Sign.' And the sign that was half its size was a BFS which stands for, well, you know what it stands for.
So around the holidays, I would ask for a BMFS and grab an A-frame sign holder, which was basically like the old sandwich boards worn by men in the 1930s, and I would turn the BMFS sideways and staple it to the A frame. On the sign, with the big paint-brushy thing, I would write: Merry Christmas - Happy New Year - Happy Hanukkah - Happy Kwanza - Happy Festivus (shiny aluminum poles are in aisle 13). Most folks got a laugh, but we sold more than a few shiny aluminum poles, and that was a Festivus miracle.
