Again, my issue isn't with being offered help. I know that they offer everyone help. My issue was with the level of insistence. I was literally not allowed to load my purchase myself. I planned to buy some cabinets and a loading van. There was a good 20-30 minutes added to my day because I also needed to rent their cargo van, and I had to wait to get it. Their van, their rules. I shop at that store all the time and I have never seen a man forced to wait for help to buy something.

I didn't day anywhere that it's a bad store or that they're bad employees. No one was being malicious. It was still irritating as fuck. I'll continue to shop there. But even if this one offense wasn't the worst thing ever, I see it as a microcosm of bigger annoyances. Its like death by a thousand paper cuts. I hear 'you cant do that' all the time, and it doesnt seem to matter if I'm in the middle of doing the thing I'm not supposed to be able to do.

I'm doing my own work because I was quoted way above market rates to have the work done professionally. Women are generally seen as easy targets. So I'm already annoyed. The hardware store isn't always the friendliest place, and the customers are usually worse than the employees. Again, annoying. I literally had to hide from some random guy while I was cabinet shopping because he kept going on about how I needed to get a man to do this for me. Having the store stop the presses because I looked weak was just icing on the cake.

You make a reasonable point, but I don't think you can really understand it as a man, because you don't have to deal with the background noise of people questioning your competence on a constant basis. Feel free to disagree, though.