Comments on: Carl Golden’s Afraid of Home Depot

By: Roscoe

Roscoe — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 03:16:33 +0000

Shop at your local Ace, True Value, or Do-It-Best! Most of the employees have a wealth of experience and many stores employ retirees with real trade experience.

By: David

David — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 13:20:29 +0000

The most significant factor in the recent lack of service at the Depot has been the building boom of the past eight years. Twelve to fifteen years ago, the economy was clicking along for IT guys, but that hadn’t really started to trickle down to the trade sector. A lot of guys were looking for work. And Home Depot was paying pretty well at the time. Hell, if you were a union electrician in the South, you could get paid more working at HD than you would on the job! As a result, you had a lot of guys with a lot of experience strapping on orange aprons. But then the building boom really hit, and everybody and his brother started a contracting company. And when CEO Bob Nardelli started cutting benefits, all the knowlegable folks in the aisles couldn’t get out the door fast enough.

By: TourPro

TourPro — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:43:08 +0000

We’ve got rumors of a Home Depot coming to town, but till then Lowe’s is the DIY place in our town. Fortunately for me, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone. When I go trolling for supplies and I need help, it’s no surprise to find my local retired plumber ready to help. Same goes for the rest of the trades. Sure, there are a good portion of “worker bees”, but it is super easy to identify who to ask for advice vs. who to ask to get that box off the top shelf.

I love this site, mostly because it makes my own DIY obsession seem tame. All the Best in the New Year!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 19:36:09 +0000

I used to work for Home Despot and I can tell you there have been lots of changes over the last 5 years. People that are close to retiring from there are talking about quiting early and not getting their retirement, just because the working conditions are so bad. The moral is so low that they rarely keep a new employee more than one season. Most of this stems from the new CEO, Bob Nardelli who is very incompetent and sees nothing but ways to get his hands on more money, not how to make a company great (which would, in the long run, provide him more money).

(from Bloomberg News)

Shareholder Controversy

At Home Depot’s annual shareholder’s conference on May 29, 2006, in Wilmington, Delaware, many of the companies shareholders expressed anger and confusion about CEO Nardelli’s pay package of $123.7 million, excluding stock option grants, over the past 5 years. Nardelli was awarded this package while Home Depot’s stock sunk about 9%, and competitor Lowe’s saw a 185% increase on a split-adjusted basis. While some stockholders were prepared to ask some tough and pointed questions to the board of directors, they were hindered by the fact that only one of the board’s members actually showed up to the meeting, Nardelli himself. Their comments were kept to a strict time limit, displayed on a large clock. Nardelli refused to acknowledge any shareholder’s comments, answer any questions, and he promptly left after only thirty minutes, causing an uproar of anger and rage. Votes on shareholder proposals afterward showed an unusually high level of dissent, with over one third withholding their support for Nardelli’s re-election as CEO.

The company’s “official” excuse for the absence of the board on the day of the meeting was that “many” of the directors were at headquarters over the past few days for their quarterly meeting and remain there today on company business. But directors had over a month’s notice of the meeting, with the date and location of the meeting being posted on April 14th, 2006. Directors are also paid for travel expenses to and from shareholder meetings by the company, with full access to a corporate jet.

Home Depot stock has sunk further since the debacle, from about $43 a share in April to just under $37 a share in early June.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 19:16:10 +0000

“Speaking of the people at the store… five or six years ago Home Depot employed a lot of knowledgeable staff that could really help, even with difficult electrical and plumbing tasks. While there are exceptions, I certainly feel that the level of service has dropped significantly at Home Depot since.”

I totally agree with you. I live in Wisconsin and have found this to be true at several Home Depot stores in our area. I work in the electrical trade. One day I asked someone in the HD electrical department where to find a motion sensor that mounts into the socket on a standard light fixture and then the bulb goes into the sensor. These are reasonably common. The HD employee looked at me as if I were speaking Klingon or something.