Home Depot To Cut 7000 Jobs & Close Expo Stores

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OMG.

Homo Depot was the employer of last resort for many a construction and renovation specialist that was displaced due to a lousy economy and the resulting suffering construction industy.

NOW where are they going to go?

Now it gets even worse...............
 
I thought those EXPO centers were owned by Sears for some reason. They generally had a nice selection of appliances, but the pricing was very high. I wonder if EXPO stores used sub contractors for delivery and installation too? Were any of those subcontractors used by EXPO able to speak English?

I think HD provides excellent customer service in their stores, but from there is goes down hill. My recent experience with them was terrible. The sales personnel I dealt with were really wonderful, but the subcontractors I dealt with after the sale were terrible. I wonder if HD realizes this is probably one of their downfalls?
 
One Of Our Dear Friend's

Husband works at Expo, and this is going to be rough on them.

He only took the job rather recently, and even then after being out of work due to a layoff for quite some time.

Yes, it is going to be rough on many a person in the "decorating", construction and so forth that sought refuge with Expo as some type of work to put meat on the table.

The way things are going with housing, there really aren't that many places in related fields hiring.
 
The Home Depot is finally getting what the so rightly deserve!They have no care for employees at all and their management sucks. I remember when I worked at Incredible Universe back in the 90's and they had the same issues regarding upper management as well as M.O.D.'s who didn't know shit from shine o'la about management.There were many pamphlets we had to read and get credit for before we'd get our "badges" and be able to move forward and make more money.Most of us were already making gobs of money and were comfortable with our duties.However, it was mandatory that all of us be able to work in any department from cutting keys to mixing and filling empty cans with new,fresh paint. You should have seen my first day in paint!!! It would have been a great episode for I love Lucy!!! One gallon can I placed in to be shaken had its top fly off and red paint went all over me,the co-worker there from hardware and the customer!!!!! That had been my first as well as last time in paint.LOL
 
The idiot MBAs

are responsible for a lot of this.

I taught for many years at a prestigious private school in Munich.
My ratings were always top-notch, from beginning to end.

Unfortunately, the school's went from outstanding to piece of stinking shit after the MBAs took over.

They decided that any teacher could teach any group. Never mind that I have degrees and certifications in IT and English as a second language...my former clients, when they returned were turned over to college kids from Ireland working in their semester breaks on the continent.

I have run (successfully) a small business since the 1980's. Have taught 9 semesters of English for Business in the MBA program at a local university (hence my distaste for MBAs, I know them from when they are still soft, pale-white grubs, writhing in shit). But never mind, I was sent to teach chemists at a prestigious client. Did my best and they were happy, but that was not the service they deserved.

We have got to return to the simple, capitalist principle of value-addition. It is not true that any competent person can do any job.

I feel sorry for the low-level employees of Home Depot. The managers deserve the worst that can happen to them.
 
When I was working for what was once the local phone company and then became SBC (worst thing that could have happened) and then became AT&T (no improvement--SBC, the most lame of all the Baby Bells, simply masquerading as AT&T) they rolled out a new system that took the customer service job from one that required at least 8 weeks of training and a fully functioning brain to a position where anyone off the street could be sat in a chair and able to check off the correct boxes on a screen without mastering any of the other critical systems necessary to do the job right. Combine this with call centers opened up in Bangalore and the end result was abominable customer service with a focus on sell, sell, sell. Service took a back seat to sales as soon as the greedy self-serving and stunningly stupid swaggering Texans took over in 1997.

I am sick of companies whose primary goal is to satisfy the shareholders instead of valuing its customer base and employees. That is the simplistic and loathesome MBA mindset that has helped run this economy into the ground.
 
Yep!

Management has over-expanded and failed to take care of customer service issues properly, so employees take the hit.

What worries me now is what's going to happen to the plaid flannel shirt industry - they just lost 7000 customers. (wry joke)
 
The thing that gets me is that they always say the shareholders are the most important thing. That they are the #1 job of a company. Supposedly legally. And certainly it's the Wall Street mentality.

And yet...the thing that matters in the long run is whether people are willing to do business. Some fast fixes, like eliminating competent customer service, may make for a good quarter. But it can make for a lousy future when people stop doing business with a company.
 
All too often corporations think that they can boost their stock by having layoffs and selling off divisions then the managers get bonuses due to the stock price elevating. "We have a duty to our stockholders" is just corporate spin.

I finally heard from Home Depot about my debacle of delivery of our new appliances. Their spin was that they use sub contractors to deliver and install their appliances. They have no control over these subcontractors as they are separate business entites. They regretted the problems I had and please asked me to think of Home Depot for my future appliance needs. Ha!
 
The MBAs may be stupid....

But go over to MSN or a site like that and the colleges still run ads that you have to get one of those degrees or you will be "left behind". Yet not one of those ads tells what you would learn or what subjects you will take (math? accounting?).
 
HD and Expo use subcontractors and the service and follow-up is terrible but it wasn't always like that.
When the founders retired back in 2000, they brought in a cast-off from GE to take over. His name is Nardelli. You may recognize that name because after he systematically ruined everything that was ever good about the HD/Expo--------he left the scorched-earth at HD to go run Chrysler!

There is a new team running HD and it will take them years to regain their reputation (if ever) in the aftermath of the toxic Nardelli administration.
 
Nardelli was brought in because he was a disciple of Jack Welch who brought a lot of profit to GE. Welch retired so he wasn't available so HD thought Nardelli would be the next best thing.
Boy did they get a surprise!
 
LOL!

@ "stupid swaggering Texans"!

SBC sounds a lot like where I once worked - Wells Fargo Bank. I was downsized in late 2002 and took a job with the Wells Fargo Phone Bank in early 2003 to "get by" until I got my own business off the ground. I was a "loans by phone officer" which was a glorified term for sales person. You couldn't even call in to check your balance without the reps trying to get you over to our "sales department" where my job was to "sell" credit cards, home quity loans and lines of credit, insurance and a variety of other things. Call me crazy, but this seemed to turn the business from "banking" to selling somewhat lousy and risky financial products to people who were neither qualified nor deserving of such products.

BTW - Wells Fargo is based in San Francisco! I wonder if they learned this trick from the "stupid swaggering Texans" or if we learned it from the Bay Area Bozos! LOL.
 
Well, Jack Welch skipped over Nardelli and chose someone else as his successor which certainly said a lot about Nardelli's abilities. Too bad (for the HD companies) Bernie and Arthur were in such a hurry to retire!
 
It's a shame because Expo had some nice stuff. But it never made any money for Home Depot. Hopefully, they'll turn the one here in Orlando into a Lowes!!
 
The writing was on the wall for Expo etc. when the housing/construction market imploded. You can tell just from walking around an HD or Lowe's and see the shelves full of unsold product (inventories have never been better for customers) and you can actually get help at HD without having to use a tranquilizer dart gun at long range.

Nardelli's error was that he started cost cutting at HD during the height of the housing boom. I remember going into HD and getting disgusted at the lack of variety and quality of products on the shelves, and often even when an item was supposed to be on the shelf it would be sold out and not replenished in a timely fashion. He applied Six Sigma to a company that needed to cater to the customers instead of to the bean counters (Six Sigma is the Quality Program for Bean Counters). Even though I went through the full Six Sigma training when I was still in IT (and got top marks in the class), I think it's horribly misused and over-rated as a one size fits all solution. I was kind of thrilled with last week's 30 Rock where they stuck more than few pins in the pompous and ironically very inefficient Six Sigma subculture that takes over in such companies (30 Rock airs on NBC, which in turn is owned by GE, which is one of the original early adopters of Six Sigma). The failure of Six Sigma generally revolves around the belief that any corporate weenie can get it.
 
Six Sigma was designed to reduce defects in a manufacturing environment. And for that, it works okay. But when they start applying it to environments for which it was never designed to work, then you've got a problem.
 
Yeah, AT&T was going the Six Sigma route before I got downsized. It was the subject of ridicule among mid-level management.

I was pleased to see Six Sigma take a hit on "30 Rock" last week too.
 
Maybe someone here can explain: I have seen want ads in the Engineering section that say a company wants a "Black Belt" and it has something to do with Six Sigma. Is that some kind of a engineer who knows karate?
 
In the company where I worked, there were several levels of Six Sigma:

Green Belt - the worker bees who got a basic short course in Six Sigma theory and practice. As I recall, it was about 1 week of instruction.

Brown Belt - managers were required to become "Brown Belts", which meant that they had to take the same training as Black Belts, but without the requirement that they spend a year herding a project to a profitable conclusion, and without the onus that they would be cast out of their jobs and would have to find new employment within the company at the end of their project.

Black Belt - Four weeks of full time training, plus a project during a four month period which hopefully would show a monetary return (or savings to the company). This is followed by a one year project in which savings must be demonstrated, and at the end of that you lose your job and have to find a new position within the company. At the end of all that you become a "Certified Black Belt".

Master Black Belt - a Certified Black Belt who can lord it over other certified Black Belts. I think it means you can teach the curriculum as well.

I think there are also Six Sigma "sponsors" among the highest levels of executive management, but I'm a bit hazy on the nomenclature and requirements there. Most likely they are also Brown Belts but at the VP level or above.

The basic Six Sigma theory and practice is fine: using a lot of up front analysis and metrics to define and measure the problem before you start throwing solutions at it. Unfortunately in practice (as I found) there is a still a strong tendency in management to pre-ordain conclusions and that leads to a quite horrid Catch-22 trap for aspiring Black Belts. Another problem I encounted was the Six Sigma folks would say, "If the project is obvious, then don't bother with a Six Sigma analysis, just go ahead and do it". My problem was that the main project I was assigned was obvious (pre-ordained), but that there was also a division directive that any project over a certain cost level had to have full Six Sigma justification, and that included my project. "Paralysis by analysis" was an apt term for the result. It was a real Catch-22.

The other problem with Six Sigma is that like any organizational unit, I've heard that in many companies the Six Sigma certified black belts etc tend to become rather arrogant dictators (at least to the non-belts) who would come into a department and make life miserable, with lots of demands for data, metrics, documented processes, etc. Also that the Six Sigmas would form their own sort of clique or secret organization that was less than socially ethical. That was the part of 30 Rock that was most amusing...

The 30 Rock scene where the Six Sigmas are all working on putting together Lego locomotives was not that far from the truth. When I took the training, the big learning activity was designing and building a catapult. One was supposed to use the Six Sigma methodolgy, which basically amounted to taking measurements and arriving at a design and process that would place the projectile on target every time. As I recall it involved wooden sticks, rubber bands, etc. My team mates were mostly managers (Brown Belts) and I was amazed at how mechanically clueless most of them were.

The coolest part of the methodology, for me at least, was the root cause analysis. It was neat to see all the different "symptoms" point back to a common cause. Although it seems logical, it's not an intuitive process because one must continuously think in the reverse of how one is accustomed to looking at problems. That is, we tend to look at a problem and try to find a solution immediately... root cause analysis forces one to forget about the solution for a bit, and instead focus on all the pathways back to the root cause(s). And quite often the actual cause of the problem is something you wouldn't have realized otherwise, or you took for granted.

The other part of Six Sigma that the program likes to point out is that unlike other "quality programs" it requires one to show the economic result of whatever changes the process finds are recommended. Hopefully that result will be a savings or an increased profit. Being a business exercise, that's important. And that tends to appeal to executives and boards of directors. Whether or not Six Sigma allows some fudging of the numbers - or ignoring some costs - to pretend there's a savings when there really isn't any - is another matter. I wonder how many Six Sigma projects showed great savings as Home Depot drove two of its units into the ground?
 
As soon as Nardelli entered the picture he systematically began the elimination of all the original founders of the company who had given all their blood,sweat and tears to make HD into the powerhouse it became. They were good and knowlegable people who knew how to serve the customer and they gave good advise on the products they sold them. They had started out with the company as a very small concern and understood that only good product knowlege and caring customer service would create strong customer loyalty.
As far as Nardelli was concerned, they had been around too long and were beginning to make way too much money-----nevermind how much money they were making for the company.
I was on the Expo "opening team" for many years and was a "Million Dollar" writer specializing in tile design for kitchen and bath.

I had started out at our store on Hammond Drive at Atlanta's Perimeter Mall. We called it "boot camp". We were slammed from the moment the doors opened every day and we learned how to get down to business and serve the customer. We had great continuous product training and knew the ins and outs of what we sold. The "open floor" policy applied to me and I was constantly in some sort of product knowlege meeting in one department or another. So whether I was in appliances or wallpaper, I knew what I was doing.

I was on the opening team at the new Buckhead store when Nardelli took over the (parent) HD company. That is where I had first-hand knowlege of how he and his cronies systematically eliminated the founders. The vast majority were gay people, and Nardelli made it no secret the the HD companies were going to be in line with the Republican administration and we were going to be huge supporters of the Bush Administration.Gays in particular became "persona non grata". And Nardelli was/is a HUGE Bush supporter. Under Nardelli a lot of money was poured into the Republican lobbyist machine. Many of us became so disgusted we simply stopped purchasing things for our own use at the HD companies.Sort of a boycott within the company.

In the meantime as the experienced people on the customer level were systematically driven-off------very unexperienced people began to be hired at the cheapest possible salaries.
Eventually they became the majority, and a customer could hardly find a knowlegable person to help them, whether in a HD store or an Expo. It was a pretty sad situation. Some of the most inept were the Human Resource people, but that figured.

After a few years the Expo's began shutting down, including the new Expo store I had worked at. Then the HD stores began to back-slide. Then the whole company began a free-fall.

Well at least Nardelli and his toxic team of cronies have now been ousted (with HUGE "Golden Parachutes" of course) and a much better team is in place.The poison will take years to flush from the company. But they must now make hard decisions to try to keep the core company alive. They have hired back some of the founding "old-timers", but it will take years (if ever) to try to get back a sense of what the company used to be.

Much like Bush has left a "scorched-earth" economy for the incoming administration to try to fix, Nardelli did the same thing to the HD companies.Only time will tell how they will emerge as a restructured concern.

In the meantime, everytime I see that rat Nardelli representing Chrysler, I know what is going on inside that company. Good luck is all I can say, but don't ask for any of my tax money to support he and his cronies! I already helped make the sob a very wealthy man. Feh!
 
Wow, I lived in Atlanta from 1999-2005 just for the crest and then decline of HD. I know well the Expo on Hammond (lived in Dunwoody)...rarely bought anything there but it was nice to get ideas. The Buckhead Expo opened about as i was leaving...definitely on the edge of the gayborhood, as i wasn't out when I lived in ATL I don't think I would have been plugged in to the goings-on at that store...
 
This story of HD sounds sort of like what happened over at Circuit City.
Back in about 1991 or so I went to a HD store to pick up supplies for a project I now can't remember. I arrived just after the store opened. I was met by an associate that welcomed me to the store and asked how he could assist me. I told him I needed supplies for my project and believe it or not he stuck with me the entire time! He went from department to department with me until I had everything. I felt kind of strange about this, I never had anything like that happen before. Usually the associates just point you in the right direction and they go back to what they were doing. This particular guy was so gung-ho, I figured he must just have gotten out of a CS training class. But it was nice and completely unexpected. I got out of there in record time due to his cheerful assistance. In fact, I went to the customer service desk and asked to speak to the store manager and told him what wonderful assistance I received.
But you sure won't see customer service like THAT in HD stores today.
 
I wasn't aware of Nardelli's political inclination, but I did observe that once Cerberus and Nardelli took over Chrysler, the design and quality of their cars seemed to take a nose dive. They had a golden opportunity to produce a Camry beater with the remodeled Sebring and its Dodge equivalent. Instead they turned an average car into a mediocre one. Just one read of what Consumer Reports' review of the Sebring brings chills (regardless of what you think of CR, when they get a lemon and admit it, they are usually 100% right). The company focused on blingmobiles like the 300 and the thoroughly atrocious Nitro. These guys could not possibly be described as "car lovers". Chrysler under Narberus also completely missed the clear signals of an impending spike in fuel prices, and failed to field any car that got much better than 20 mpg in real world driving.

Nardelli's strong Republican sympathies are not a surprise, as one of the prime execs at Cerberus is none other than former vice president Dan Quayle. No doubt the rest of the Cerberus management is equally filled with red kool-aid.
 
Appliances are only 10% off.

I gave up on so-called "Going out of business" sales long ago. I remember there was a shop on Market Street in SF that had been going out of business for about 20 years. Heck, it's probably still there, with the same sign.

It's designed to appeal to the petty larceny in most of us. We like to think we're getting something for nothing. LOL, the crafty shop owner gets the better of many people with these liquidation sales... it's more a triumph of cynical psychology than marketing, though. In a world where spammers and telemarketers make millions, though, it's obvious that a sucker is born every millisecond.
 

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