A trip to the home improvement store quickly turned sour for one woman after one of the store’s supervisors decided to get misogynistic while dealing with what should have been a routine return.
Despite how advanced the age we’re living in may seem at times, it sadly doesn’t take much searching to find examples that prove our society’s more outdated attitudes haven’t been confined to the past.
And for many women, that proof comes when they clock into work as it’s still hardly unheard of for bosses to have sexist expectations for them or for coworkers to dismiss their ideas and pass them off as their own at the same time.
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But as satisfying as it is to watch someone’s own chauvinistic attitudes mess their day up , it’s not always common for the consequences of someone’s misogyny to be that immediate and visible.
Instead, experiences tend to be closer to what one woman experienced after renting some equipment from the Home Depot.
On June 5, a TikTok user who goes by Bougie White Trash on the platform uploaded a video explaining why she was angry after her most recent visit to Home Depot.
And she started by saying that as a woman who was doing the kind of work that people traditionally consider “manly,” she was expecting to get a hard time from the men working there while renting a pressure washer.
But at first, she was pleasantly surprised because the employee she rented it from spoke to her respectfully and showed her how it worked without patronizing her.
Yet when she returned the washer the following day, she soon found that she had that initial feeling for a reason.
Because soon after she arrived, a man who she would later learn is a supervisor at the store immediately started chiding her for not rolling up the hose before returning it.
And after she said she understood, he continued and said the store would charge her extra because of that. Curiously, when she essentially asked him what his problem was, he suddenly backpedalled and told her he was kidding, which she didn’t believe.
Instead, she replied with, “You were in a pissy mood this morning and you decided to take it out on me because I’m a woman and you’re a man.”
But while many men in his position would get worried and deny any such bias, the woman said that this supervisor’s eyes quickly turned deeper towards hatred and he started asking her whether she put gas in the washer.
When she replied that she had, he opened the tank and decided what she had put in didn’t count as a full tank.
It’s worth noting that neither Home Depot’s return policy nor its tool rental policy mentions anything about requirements to roll up hoses or to put gas in power tools. That gas requirement exists for rented vehicles , but that’s it.
But whether the supervisor was making up rules or misunderstanding existing ones, the woman made it clear that she didn’t want to deal with him anymore so he called for another associate.
But while this person was far more respectful, the supervisor still tried to make their interaction as hard as possible by turning on the loud washer five feet away from them and yelling at the associate to charge her for gas as he walked away.
As we can see by the end of her video, this prompted the associate to sigh heavily and give the woman a phone number so she could report her experience.
It remains unclear what has come from that report, but the woman has pledged to call out any similar attitudes as she experiences them.