Home Depot Rain Gutters and the General Decline of America

Some call it Vulture Capitalism.

Part of the reason why construction workers in California face a 50% unemployment rate is because homeowners turn to big box hardware stores and do home improvement projects themselves when in the good old days they would hire a contractor. I can have some compassion for the homeowners. Incessant advertizing works.

There was a term coined back in 1932 called; designed obsolescence.
That was the notion that by making a product that was inherently poor in quality, the consumer would have to purchase the product again, or replacement parts. The planned suck of the product created a revenue stream going forward.
That concept is alive and well at Home Depot. Yes, I know I risk the wrath of a Goliath by calling a mega-corp out by name. I mentioned other names but HD has personally hurt me the worst. The insult after the injury is that the quality of most goods sold there are such that I can't use them and run a business and offer a warranty.
For example; all plastics are not equal. Some become brittle when exposed to sunlight. Some expand and contract a lot.

The drain pipe sold at Ewing Golf is not the same as the drain pipe sold at Home Depot, and contractors are forced to deal with a duped public that doesn't seem to understand or care that they are being ripped off.

I my career I have removed miles of junk gutters sold by Home Depot, Lowes and other big box vendors. I have also made the mistake of running there when I was short a tube of caulking, and you guessed it, the caulking from Home Depot is the stuff that doesn't seal well.

It's a bummer when I go to a elderly couples house, as I did today, and hear them explain how they paid a Home Depot approved ' contractor ' to install a system that often costs double what a modern professionally installed seamless system costs. The so called contractors change names every few years as the lawsuits pile up, leaving the elderly couple with a damaged home that looks atrocious.

There have been a few times over the years when I have had homeowners ask me incredulously why I don't install vinyl gutters. When I explained to them that the plastic used by the mega-corps was the most reactive to the U.V. rays and becomes brittle and then warped and cracked, sometimes they wouldn't believe me.   To listen to a home owner tell me how the gutter from Home Depot was just as good as the aluminum extruded from the back of my machine, or how I was really no different from the day laborers outside of the Home Depot; trying. And, why should they have to pay a fifty dollar per man per hour rate? ( right after that question the same people might ask me if I carry workers comp ) I was always polite and usually refused to write a bid for them and drove away hoping their house flooded.

I have evolved to not blame the home owner, as they are subject to flashy advertisements with catchy jingles from the well funded super stores. Have you ever noticed the ratio of orange vest workers to customers in a Home Depot? There usually seems to be three employes to every one customer. How do you think they fund that?
By selling garbage. And selling it again. And again, usually to the same duped customer.

Elbow of downspout cocked at such an angle that it couldn't possibly work.

After spending $1,100.00 ( +- ) on this system, the elderly couple is now finally turning to a licensed contractor selling seamless gutters. Their bid? $1,326.00

It amazes me to go through a place like Point Loma, Del Mar or Pacific Beach and see million dollar homes with plastic garbage gutters from Home Depot, but I do it and see it almost every day and I confess it irks me.

The elbow has no male female connection relationship so the water would spill out the pipe

Just like the over inflated housing market largely destroyed the economy in California, the big box stores like Walmart and Home Depot seem to systematically destroy small businesses and extract a maximum amount of money and get a disturbing amount of assistance from the consumers. After the small shops and contractors are gone, the Home Depots of the world are free to sell their wares ( however poor in quality ) for a premium. After all, there is little surviving competition and the public doesn't know any better, or is apathetic about the carnage being wrought and the long term damage on the marketability of their children.
I have learned its the same with the professional supply houses. For example, Service Partners owns both Rain Gutter Supply with two locations just in So. Cal and they own Masco Home Services which is one of the largest gutter garage door/patio covers and more, companies in the nation. So, the contractor who tries to start a business competes with big box fortune 500 companies for the bigger jobs and unregulated unlicensed usually illegal alien " contractors " for the flotsam and jetsam scraps left over in the residential market. Meanwhile it seems like the only regulated businesses are the very small as the big ones know how to fudge and who to payoff and the illegal ones are ignored by a mysteriously motivated government who's ways and meanings are as incomprehensible to a normal person as any lost language scratched in to canyon walls or stone tablets.
Another rather sorry example comes to mind when the president ( pick your puppet ) talks about " shovel ready jobs " and " buildings the bridges and highways ". What they leave out is that for decades the largest winner of large construction projects, and I'm talking about your roads and bridges, your dams, your airports and football stadiums, has been Skanska. A little construction outlet based in Sweden.
Maybe the work-a-day stiffs running the skip loader have a job, and that's important. But the profits go out of this country and no construction company worth less than $500 million dollars can even think about someday working up to maybe being a sub of Skanska or even bid against them.

These gutters were installed over a front step, when they began to fall off because the screws provided with the brackets were too short the 83 year old home owner slipped and cut his hand on the screen door requiring 17 stitches.

And how about that gutter screen sold by Home Depot and the others?
Debris from the roof and wind blown seeds combine to accumulate in the gutters. Eventually the gutters become a garden. The large mesh screens do not work, period. The customers have been condition to buy these, the gutter clog anyways, and the contractor who buys from the big box or big supply company is in the awkward position of having sold a product that had no possibility of ever really working?

I got called to investigate a leak in the gutters that was causing water to go inside the patio. Hello??? The rain gutter drained on to a patio that had gutter and screen. There was so much accumulated debris that the rain backed up, went in to the roof and flooded the patio room. That's a warranty issue, lol. The homeowner faced the dilemma that the patio gutter was so inaccessible and impossible to clean that she ended up with a full blown gutter garden;

The home owner no doubt paid good money for a patio cover. They never suspected that the thing would be purposefully designed NOT to function to NOT be maintainable, so that water would eventually route inside the sunroom leading to it's demolition and replacement. Who thinks up business models like this? 

Looking at it another way; I am part of the problem.
When my shop was humming I wanted to buy an American made drill press but I balked at the five thousand dollar price. So I bought a seven hundred dollar Chinese made one, once a year for almost ten years, because we used to drill a lot of holes. That American made drill press? Good luck finding a new one now.
There were times when I could have bought American but didn't. Now in some cases, I can't.
So what are we doing about it now that it seems the damage has been done?

We are adjusting, waiting for the government to...equally enforce the laws. We will not hire people that can't legally drive vehicles or use fraudulent documents for taxes. In the years past, that meant we couldn't grow. Why is not E-verify the law of the land? Why is my illegal alien competition free to not have business license, drivers license, insurance, bonding, etc? Why are the biggest projects utterly locked in by massive corporations that own both the installation companies and the supply chains? How does an honest contractor function in this environment?

By buying American trucks, tools, equipment and supplies and doing the best quality work one job at a time and only hiring people that have full citizenship, even if it means we can't grow. One thing I learned in my trips to Africa is that the only way to deal with corruption is with a raised hand and one extended finger.

America will figure it out someday.