u/modern_prometheus_13

Can someone explain the recent changes in stock & inventory that seem to be happening, at least at my closest location? Don’t get me wrong, as a fabricator & blacksmith HD has always, at least for many of my needs, pretty limited when it comes to some stuff. But typically for common construction needs, I’ve found I’ve always been able to cover my bases (mostly). The last x4 trips I’ve made, looking for extremely common materials, I’ve walked out empty handed each time, some of which I’ve gotten not long ago before. And when the store is 30 mins out, and you need to check for several things each trip and 90% of employees don’t seem to have much knowledge about what you’re looking for (not a dig, that’s life until you learn how things work), this can amount to a massive accumulated waste of time. Some examples of things that are recently, not simply out of stock, but are just not carried any longer at my store (in some cases “no longer carried” or “out of stock” online as well):

-3/8” MC flex conduit of any length
-2 pole 200amp breaker switch (bought the subpanel there, forgot the necessary switch for the main, went back now that it’s time for wiring but they don’t carry the sometimes-necessary switch for the panel they sell. Not online either)
-hydraulic jack oil
-terminal & cable sealant for exposed aluminum wire
-AC drain hose elbow

Is anyone else having this experience or is it just me?

Please know that I say this as an agrarian rural American myself and that I know there are a thousand exceptions for every generalization.

The notion that rural & southern peoples are largely a bunch of inbred, ignorant, uneducated hicks- one that I’ve aggressively pushed back on my whole life as an oppressive & classist ignorance in its own right- I no longer feel right disputing.

Once, within memory of my lifetime, education deprivation was an absolute, irrefutable causation that rural peoples were disproportionately affected by, not unlike the even more aggressive and intentional education/voting accesses deprived of black Americans since, well, always. It still is, there is no doubt about that.

However, I cannot contribute to the modern plague of general truth denial and turn my head away from the reality that formal education is as inconsequential to one’s capacity for knowledge as it ever has been, and I say this as a man who completed only a semester of highschool.

What have white rural Americans done with the gift of the world’s collective knowledge, histories, and data within the palms of our hands? What have we done with the opportunities presented by internet network expansion subsidies and vital, generously funded private philanthropic programs to fight illiteracy?

We vote to have those opportunities stripped and rolled back. Every single fucking time. It doesn’t seem to be that access is much of an issue these days, as white rural “influencers” will have time to build a strong online following & film themselves shooting a black man at a courthouse after deploying hate slurs, or your PeePaw who sits around posting racist “memes” he made but still can’t deploy proper grammar for, calling people libtards on Facebook all goddam day, and thinking he’s just the most clever fucking person alive for doing so while he pays $6+ for diesel.

We will bitch and demoan the rapid development of data centers in our own backyards, proclaiming them to be for government mass servailance or UFO research, but tomorrow without hesitation would go vote for a 3rd term for the Man who’s sponsoring their appearances. But we won’t do 5 minutes of very basic, 4th-grade level paper research to understand basic facts about them, or fucking anything.

White rural Americans are so fucking stupid and aggressively self-destructive that the only conceivable cause of this that I can reasonably arrive at is an abundance of intergenerational cousin-fucking. I seldom leave my own land much these days because the ignorance and racism that has kept these fucking people in their own prisons of poverty is so fucking enraging I just can’t deal with it.

Go read a fucking book. For fuck’s sake.