+1 to everything you say here. The store manager track is very much a Corporate vs Retail (hourly) thing at least at the big chains. I worked retail in high sc

+1 to everything you say here. The store manager track is very much a Corporate vs Retail (hourly) thing at least at the big chains. I worked retail in high school and college in the same era as you mentioned and even 20 years ago, a store manager at a Best Buy or a Costco was clearing $250k or more, at least in the wealthier-Atlanta area where I lived (I know a lot of HD employees being from Atlanta and my knowledge of corporate and sales manager salaries at HD aligns with yours too), as you said, based in part on bonuses related to store revenue (the Best Buy stores I worked at when I was 16 - 22 were two of the top-ranked stores in the southeast region by sales, with some departments being among the top 10 in the whole company). For some of the chains, I think that has decreased as in-store sales have shifted but places like Costco notoriously pay their store managers extremely well. Best Buy desperately wanted me to quit college and be fast-tracked into store or sales management (I would spend my summers as a manager of a department and they agreed to keep me at that elevated hourly wage even when I was part-time during the school year), trying to lure me with tales of just how much money the top of the foodchain people make, but I never took it seriously. Given the ebbs and flows of the economy (I graduated from college in 2008) and the collapse of the retail market from its early 2000s high in favor of ecommerce/Amazon, that was almost certainly the right decision -- but it was an instructive lesson for me at a young age about the very disparate differences in compensation between the hourly workers and the people at the top of those stores.