So my theory was that, OK, if the majority of the people that are in this field are all going to retire in 10 years, that means that there's going to be a massive shortage and the wages will go up. Well, COVID accelerated that by five years. So in my field specifically, there's over a million open positions nationwide, specifically in this field.
So now take that and stratify that across all of the other to all the other trades. There are massive openings in all these other trading fields because, again, and if you don't believe that we have a problem with people not learning how to do physical labor and not going into the trades and whatnot, you need to go look at the study that Home Depot did.
There's a great study that Home Depot put out.
This is a hysterical study. They found out that millennials and people of under the age of 30, none of them know how to swing a fucking hammer.
Like it's a real study.
They did a study to figure out and they started offering classes, DIY classes, how to do upgrades to your home classes, because they are terrified that they were going to lose like 20 percent of their entire market share because people were not going to want to do repairs to their homes. That's why Home Depot and Lowe's, they transferred to be like a contractor style business, right? So that you can be a contractor, you can pick up your supplies. So they became like a wholesale market thing.
That's why those two businesses moved to that because they looked into the market. They looked out there and they found out that people aren't fixing things anymore. And there's a very, very, very, very large deficit there.
And we haven't fixed that problem yet, which is why one of the things we need to address is we need to convince people that not everybody needs to go to freaking college. Like you don't need to go get your basket-weaving degree. You don't need to go get your sociology degree.