The nation's largest home improvement retailer just confirmed what working Americans already feel: you can't afford to buy a home, and you can't afford to fix one either. Home Depot reported Tuesday that customers have abandoned large renovation projects and are spending only on small-scale repairs — trapped in a housing market that Bidenomics has effectively frozen.
Home Depot's second-quarter sales rose 5.7% to $47.9 billion, and comparable sales edged up 1.7%, beating Wall Street expectations. But the headline numbers mask the squeeze. CFO Richard McPhail called it what it is: a "frozen housing market." Customers, he told CNBC, "have the means to spend, they're just hesitant" — and that hesitancy grows as "the project gets bigger." They're worried about "inflation, about fuel costs and about general uncertainty."
Translation: Americans are patching leaks and painting walls because a new deck or kitchen remodel is off the table when money is this tight.
Fox Business noted the affordability math that locks people out. Existing-home sales fell 1.7% in July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.06 million, per the National Association of Realtors. The median existing-home price hit $434,100 — up 2% from a year ago. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate sits at 6.67%, according to Freddie Mac, up from 6.58% a year earlier. That means a typical buyer is staring at a monthly payment that would have been unthinkable four years ago, when rates sat below 3%.
CNBC framed the story as a Wall Street win — earnings beat, share gains, the company "serving customers better every day." The network buried the real story beneath analyst expectations and guidance reaffirmations. Fox Business at least led with the affordability pressure, though both outlets gave the Biden economy a pass.
Here's what neither outlet wanted to spell out: Home Depot's average ticket rose 2.8% to $92.50, while comparable customer transactions declined 1%. People are paying more per trip and making fewer trips. That's not a healthy consumer. That's inflation eating into purchasing power while Americans stretch every dollar across smaller, necessary projects.
McPhail insisted Home Depot's customer is "a healthy cohort" and pointed to tariff refunds that "partially offset unplanned fuel, energy, and other product input costs." Notice the word partially. Costs are still going up. The company is absorbing what it can and passing on what it must.
The bipartisan failure here is plain. The Fed jacked rates to fight inflation that Washington's spending created. Now mortgage rates sit high enough to freeze the housing market entirely, and both parties pretend this is just a cyclical slowdown. It's not. This is a structural affordability crisis that has locked a generation out of homeownership and left the rest unable to invest in the homes they're stuck renting or barely affording.
Home Depot reaffirmed its full-year guidance — sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5%, comp sales flat to 2%. The company says long-term demand for home improvement remains strong. Maybe. But "long run" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In the meantime, the middle class isn't shrinking. It's being crushed — one $92.50 trip to the hardware store at a time.
