Tell me you're American without saying you're American.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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I enjoy the joke, but I think the key difference is that people still regularly visit Home Depot to buy things while Best Buy is a ghost town. Kinda hard to sell your services as a day laborer in IT if you're not getting any foot traffic.
Can someone explain the joke to the Europeans? We don't have either of those and I have no idea what this means. I know Best Buy is a electronics store and Home Depot is a hardware store, but I have no idea what the parking lots have to do with it. In Europe it's more common for shops to be all close together with a shared parking lot in between.
Home Depot is a home improvement warehouse. "Hardware store" is underselling it a bit as they sell lumber, building supplies, appliances, flooring, roofing, lawn and garden supplies, etc. You'd be better off buying from a wholesale lumber yard or building supply, but Home Depot has a contractor supply program. You can buy everything you need to build a house out of a Home Depot. It's a direct competitor to Lowe's; if you watch videos about American woodworking you may hear them obliquely refer to "orange and blue big box stores." Home Depot's logo color is orange, Lowe's is dark blue. Home Depot also has a theme song that slaps harder than it has any right to. And "big box" is apt; you can measure the average floor space in a Home Depot or Lowe's in acres. Home Depots tend to stand alone with their own parking lots.
It's something of a stereotype for day laborers especially Mexican immigrants to hang out in the parking lot of a Home Depot waiting to be hired for work. Need a building roofed? Go to the Home Depot parking lot and hire a half dozen Mexicans to get it done cheap, fast, and probably well, so goes the stereotype. I associate this image with the Southwest, I've never personally seen this here on the Eastern Seaboard.
Best Buy is a big box electronics retailer, they sell televisions, computers, cell phones, game consoles and video games, etc. They have a reputation for not having many customers because most people shop online now; in fact there was a joke going around that Best Buy was Amazon's showroom. People would go into Best Buy to see the product in person, leave the store and order it from Amazon cheaper. Best Buy is also known for their in-house tech support staff called the Geek Squad. Best Buy sort of sells PC parts, compared to something like MicroCenter they have a pathetic inventory of ATX stuff but I have bought the occasional SSD from there, they also sell garbage tier laptops and tablets. Best Buys often anchor strip malls and will have other stores attached to them, sharing one long parking lot.
OP is trying to conjure an image of a bunch of IT guys and developers milling around in a strip mall parking lot waiting around for someone to hire them to configure a server or something as if they're undocumented immigrants looking for work paid under the table.
I assume the joke is (usually undocumented) people look for work in the parking lots of Home Depots, hoping to be hired for day labor, and the same may happen with the nerd glut in our culture and Best Buys.
I've never witnessed this as I live in a smaller city in Northern MN but it's a cliche here in the States.
The nerds haven't hung out at best buys in years. They're a glorified appliance store now.
Last time I went into one for a computer part, they had 3 colors of the same case fan and two different GPUs, and that was it.
Now MicroCenter, that's where it's at.
Where is there one? I know of one north of Atlanta and one in Dallas. There just ain’t one in Washington
There's 1 in most major cities. I love Micro Center to death, but I sincerely doubt that most Americans live within 20 or 30 minutes of one.
Yeah, west coast is a bit barren for micro center. One in LA, one in SF (when they open). I have 3 in my state (Ohio) but their headquarters is also here so shrug
Ah, right, Best Buy was the Geek Squad. That's who would be hanging out there.
This is probably it and I was totally lost. Thank you.
I've seen this at every Home Depot and Lowe's that I have ever been to. There are always day laborers looking for work.
I wonder if it's regional
I've lived and traveled all over the Pacific Northwest and been to many hardware stores throughout, and never seen it myself.
Not sure about lately, but ten years ago the Home Depot on Aurora in Seattle always had a group of guys hanging out near the entrance.
I didn't get it either and am American.
I have not seen this myself, but I have relatives that own several rental property and they often see people in Home Depot parking lots just standing around waiting for work. They'd then talk to them and offer them to work on their properties. I think the reason is that these are likely either undocumented immigrants or new immigrants that cant find a job, so they just stand around hoping someone will offer them work. They are probably cheaper than a US citizen worker doing the same thing. Although, the quality of work will vary, and the quality of their work is... questionable. (I mean, they aren't gonna have licenses or anything)
I'm not sure about Home Depot but Walmart is known for letting people camp in their cars on the parking lot where as many other stores don't so I assume this is a joke about IT people sleeping in their cars on the Best Buy parking lot.
Letting people camp? What do you mean ?
Homeless and van-life people for example tend to favour these kinds of parking lots for when they need a place to park overnight and sleep in their vehicles. Some other stores send staff knocking on your window and telling you to go elsewhere.
Walmart sends the police after people who sleep in their cars. I know because it happened to me when I was homeless.
A bunch of young white guys standing out front offering cheap IT services?
"I need 3 guys to help install a router."
Do people do that ar Home Depot?
The router is a Juniper MX960
I like working in those. JunOS seems to give the most helpful error messages compared to Cisco IOS or Nokia SR OS.
I used to cable them up or swap out PICs, never got a chance to try JunOS though.
Gotcha - we’re on opposite sides of the backplane, so to speak. I’m in the opposite position - I’m an IP tech and frequently coordinate with field techs to migrate our customers’ circuits between service routers, and I’ve never actually seen one of these in person.
That thing looks like a module for a spacecraft. :O
It might as well be if it weren't for the weight lol
Does this really happen at Home Depots? Or is this all derived from the family guy scene?
It absolute does
So other just doesn't happen at any of the home depots I have gone to across 7 states and untold amount of towns in each state? Lol
I guess? I’ve seen it at multiple Home Depot’s in Georgia, Florida, Washington state, Texas, Louisiana, and Nevada. Which are also the only states I’ve gone to Home Depot’s in
Edit: maybe it’s time of day? They are usually all hired out by 9-10am
Seriously asking because now I'm intrigued. What does the scenario look like and how does it work? Are there dudes just literally loitering infront of the store? What do the contractors hiring them do, say what they're looking for and the workers sort it out who goes or is the contractor treating it like a line up of hookers and picking the one thst looks most hard working lol. Why wouldn't the people looking for work just post fliers instead of wasting the time standing there? I've definitely seen that at some hardware stores. Usually mom and pop local shops where they'll have a corkboard for handymen to hang flyers on.
So firstly yes, dudes are just hanging out in front of the store, folks approach them, usually say something like “Trabajo? Tres workers?” or “Looking for a few workers for the day” And wait for a response, I assume a price is negotiated somehow but I’ve not heard that bit.
As far as flyers, most if not all of these folks are undocumented migrants, if they have a phone line it’s not a permanent one, and they also don’t want immigration enforcement to be able to trace them that way. You show up to Home Depot, get work and pay for the day and then move to the next job. Much less risk of being identified by the government.
As far as wasting time, from their perspective it’s a waste of time to be waiting around for a phone call when they could be at the spot where the contractor is going to be anyways for supplies
It was a thing, briefly I think. It might still happen some places. I haven’t seen anybody hanging out in a HD lot for probably 20 years now. When I lived in TX the local HD usually had a half-dozen guys give or take for hire for odd jobs.