I've been meaning to post some comments about Home Depot for a while now. I'm a longtime fan of their stores, though once I was the enemy, working at Home Club in the late '80s. I even held stock in their company for several years. Sadly, viciously, ignorantly they've now jumped the retail shark.

On television to "Jump the Shark" is to go to the lame side, where the writers are all recycled from the "I Love Lucy" camp of sad and improbably and down-right silly television. The phrase it self refers to a "Happy Days" episode where Fonzy, wearing a leather jacket, jumps a corralled shark, while on water skis. It's considered to be the moment in the Happy Days saga where the show officially turned south and hit the accelerator.

For retail, I use "Jump the Shark" to mean finally lost their corporate mind and got so cheap to as to ruin a good business with penny pinching madness. Home Depot has done this.

"How the hell has my beloved Home Depot done this", you ask? A few simple moves and they're flying over the shark, leather jacket and all.

1. Tool corral
2. Checking your receipt at the door
3. Automated checkout.

The tools corral
Once this was a not so bad means of controlling shrinkage. Essentially a mini store within a store. You entered the tool corral, and paid for your purchases as you left. If you had more shopping to do, you did it and visited the cashier a second time. The store in Glendale, CA now features easier access to the inexpensive hand-tools, but corralled access the big, expensive, mostly power tools. This makes no sense. People can't lift a table saw, or a shop grinder. The bad part, though, is the fact that I can't get my shopping cart into the corral (now dubbed "register 21") because there is only enough space for one person to pass at register 21. Nevermind when a line of people develop and I'd like to push a cart in (with my son happily seated in the child seat). Really I can't do justice to the idiocy of this setup, you'll just have to road trip here to see it.

Checking your receipt at the door
Never mind that I put my receipt away at the register--along with my credit card, but I *OWN* the stuff by the time I'm at the door. Please don't inconvenience me further Home Depot, I'm already PO'd enough about the other stuff.

Automated checkout
Again, not the worst idea on the planet if you don't mind standing in line behind an angry, leathery 53 year old in a surly booze stupor while he tries to negotiate with a cash register. I really wouldn't hold it against them if they installed the automated registers, but still had a decent number of cashiers on staff, but in their effort to save sixteen cents an hour, Home Depot will have only a single register staffed in the main store. The line to this register will often lead down the lighting isle ending in the last sane person in the store.

There's more that Home Depot is doing wrong. Pallets are left in isles as a way of merchandising, even though only a single cart can pass at a time. Leaving the tall stock ladder on wheels in the tool corral isles, and well...okay my rant peters out here. But you get my point.
- posted Sunday, July 03, 2005 10:00 PM by Steve