With spring finally here, I’m finally getting around to gardening and fixing up the landscaping in the back yard. At the Home Depot store about a mile from my house, starting just this past week, I found that EVERY bag of mulch was torn in the corners. This makes getting the mulch back to my house a mess; it spills on the way to the register, it spills in my car, and it spills all along the walkway from the driveway to the backyard.
I asked someone why every bag of mulch were torn. The answer? “It’s so it airs out.” What? Seriously, why the fuck would Home Depot not have a single intact, completely sealed bag of mulch in the entire store? Wy the hell would mulch need to be “aired out”, anyhow?
If that truly is the reason I suspect it’s not so it “airs out” but rather to let the air out. They’ll take up less floor space if they can stack them higher (due to them being thinner and flatter).
Fresh packaged mulch still has organic things happening which create gas. If the bags are kept sealed shut, the bags will blow up to the point of popping. When the bags blow at the seams, they tend to lose a lot of the material. My wife worked at a regional home improvement store up to a few years ago. She said that they just poked the bags a few times with a knife, they did not tear open the corners.
The bags of mulch I buy all come with preperforated holes. If the bag is torn, I buy another. At HD, there are usually a fair number of broken bags around the stacks of stock. I presume they get broken by mishandling, as there are usually plenty of intact bags available.
We use a lot of mulch at our house. We’re transforming the entire front yard to flower gardens. Eventually we’ll ban grass entirely.
Most suppliers would use bags that are perferated. I would have used a pencil to pop a bag if it needed to deflate. I can tell you the likely reason the corners are all torn. Somebody can’t operate the forlift properly and they catch the corners of the pallets when being moved. All bags get ripped after a couple moves. You could have a manager at the particular store you shop at that has some stupid notions in their head, and they are having the employees rip all the bags open. One person high up with a stupid idea can do something like this.