Out with the Old, In with the SKU

The latch on the door to the garage got stuck. No amount of WD-40 would loosen it because the problem was a spring that had lost its springiness.

After disassembling the doorknob, I took the part to Home Depot.

There were shelves upon shelves of new locksets but nowhere a spare latch to be found.

The old-timers who used to work at Home Depot would have walked the customer to the spot and fished for the part out of a box.

Instead, that morning, there was only a kid, barely out of high school, who was restocking the shelves. He was proficient at scanning numbers on boxes, looking up their location on a hand-held device, then putting the box on the proper shelf.

He didn't need to know anything about hardware; he could be filling up the spaces with cans of soup or cotton socks.

I showed him the latch. He asked, "What's the "skew"?" (Yes, I know he meant SKU.)

Largely successful in eliminating sarcasm--the kid didn't deserve it--I replied, "The latch is over 20 years old. I don't think it had a 'skew.' It's a latch for a Kwikset lock."

He struggled, furiously typing on his device.

I pulled up the Home Depot app on the iPhone, searched for Kwikset, and scrolled down to the SKU (pictured) in 20 seconds. He re-entered the numbers and found the item at location L-something, hidden behind some boxes on the floor. I found a new latch for $8, so the expedition was a success.

I did give a passing thought to the old-timers. They would know what to do with the part after taking it home, but that knowledge is unnecessary to the functioning of 21st-century retail stores. The kid's job is safer, but I felt sorry for him, too. The robots are coming.