I work at Home Depot. Ask me anything.

[jmowreader]

On the occasion of my 4100th post, ask away...

[name not needed]

1. Do you have wood?

:P

[jmowreader]

4. Vast amounts of wood. Far more than the Bush Lumber Company

I've got about $350,000 worth of lumber in stock right now, and my racking isn't full.

I keep the following woods in stock at all times:

Spruce/Pine/Fir (which is usually Northern Spruce) in 2x4 and 2x6

Southern Yellow Pine, in white and pressure-treated, in 2x8, 2x10 and 2x12, and in pressure-treated only in 2x4, 2x6, 5/4x6 decking, 4x4, 4x6 and 6x6

Southern Yellow Pine plywood in both white and pressure-treated, and as T1-11 siding

Red Oak dimensional stock and Red Oak plywood

Birch plywood

Poplar dimensional stock

Golden Virola plywood

Lauan plywood

Oriented Strand Board

Particle Board

Medium Density Fiberboard

Tempered Hardboard

Radiata Pine dimensional stock

Western Red Cedar dimensional stock and bevel siding

I also have WoodStalk, which is wheat straw ground fine, pressed with polyurethane adhesive, and painted with linear urethane enamel. This is good shelving.

And once a year I get either maple or poplar plywood. This year it was poplar.

Most of my wood is Forest Stewardship Council-certified. Which is more than you can say for Bush Lumber Company wood.

As Bob Boudelang's landlady says, what kind of idiot doesn't know he owns a lumber mill?

[name not needed]

6. Huh huh. You said wood. And bush. Huh huh.

[jmowreader]

8. I didn't know Bush could get wood anymore

Isn't impotence one of the side effects of long-term alcohol abuse?

[Joe Power]

2. Where can I get a screw?

I see where this thread is going fast.

[jmowreader]

5. If you vote Republican, you're screwed

[Joe Power]

13. I voted Democrat

Why do I feel so screwed?

[jmowreader]

16. Because too many other people voted Republican

:shrug: One is "too many," so we're dealing with vast overages.

[XNASA]

3. How much for a good.....

...ballcock?

[jmowreader]

7. Between eight and twenty-five dollars...

depending on how big your ball is, and what you want it made from.

[hatredisnotavalue]

9. Do you race around those motorized carts afterhours? n/t

[jmowreader]

12. What motorized carts?

All the carts we have here are manually-pushed. You may be thinking of the Shriners.

I guess we could race the reach trucks, but that wouldn't be any fun--they go three whole miles per hour; I can walk faster than that.

The problem with racing things around after hours is that once you close the store and do all your closing procedures, the last thing you want to do is stay at the store to play games.

[hatredisnotavalue]

17. You know those things they move the big items with

They go..beep, beep..they are huge and orange...

[jmowreader]

21. Those are not "carts"

We have several kinds of powered lift equipment:

The Raymond 4D crab-steer reach truck, which can be driven sideways

(if you have a crab-steer reach in your store, and not everyone does, it's one of these because Raymond is the only company that makes one)

The narrow-aisle reach truck


The order picker

(this is for taking things out of the racking that aren't on pallets. You put some kind of a pallet on the forks of this machine, then raise the operator's compartment up to the product and stack the products on the machine.)

The propane-powered forklift


The slipsheet machine


The electric pallet jack


And the electric ladder, which I can't find a picture of online (or at least a picture of one that's bigger than a dime), but it's this thing you have to push around by hand.

But no, you can't race those things--who the hell wants to race something that's governed to 5mph? Where's the fun in that?

[Ellen Forradalom]

10. Do you sell booth-building kits during Sukkot?

I'm gonna try to build a sukkah this fall.

[jmowreader]

15. No, but we can sell you the stuff to make one

http://www.sukkot.com/sukkah_kits.htm shows a picture of a sukkah assembled from their Sukkah kit...the kit seems to include a tarp for the walls and a big batch of Simpson Strong-Tie wood-to-wood fasteners.

The lazy way to do this would be to buy the Simpson workbench kit, find a Jewish associate (if you're in a place that celebrates this holiday to the point that people are building sukkot, the store has Jewish associates), explain to that person what you're getting ready to do, and have them sketch you out a plan for a Sukkah frame.

Or if you're in North Carolina, just come to Fayetteville and see me at the store. I'll fix you right up.

[Pirate Smile]

11. What should we know that most of us don't know about Home Depot?

[jmowreader]

37. Hmm...do you want Good Things or Bad Things?

A few Good Things:

* Home Depot pretty much singlehandedly ended the practice of post-disaster price gouging. This was when Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were still running the company. In the days before Home Depot, suppliers would double the price of their merchandise after natural disasters, because they knew they could charge anything they pleased and get it. A few days before a disaster hit back when we were a medium-size company (only about 500 stores), Bernie Marcus picked up his telephone, called the CEO of all of his suppliers, and told them "I have a list of what everything your company sells my company costs, and if you raise the prices on any of it while people are recovering from this disaster, my company will never buy anything from your company again." Problem solved.

* Home Depot has solved the problem of managers working their people 29 hours per week so as to deny them benefits by allowing its part-time associates to take advantage of almost all the benefits the full-time staff is entitled to. (There are three benefits a part-timer can't take advantage of, and the least esoteric one is overseas adoption assistance.)

* Home Depot is still paying our associates who serve in the Reserves or National Guard, and who have been activated for service in George Bush's Wars, the difference between their military pay and their Home Depot pay. And we are continuing their benefits.

* We know where all of our wood comes from, and have made a concerted effort to stop purchasing old-growth timber. (Some of it gets in, but we're working on it.) We are the biggest funding source for the Forest Stewardship Council.

* We are taking some positive steps to make our stores safer. Two examples: We used to have 16-foot rolling ladders, until we determined that the 16-foot ladder was our largest single cause of associate injuries because they tip over. Those ladders have been replaced by the "electric ladder," which is a hydraulically-elevated platform. And we require pallets of doors to be completely broken down and packed out after we figured out broken pallets of doors could fall out of the overhead.

Now, some of the bad:

* We're more reactive than proactive on safety. One quick example is "bookcasing" of doors--displaying them with the side of the casing facing the customer. It took a handful of squashed customers before someone figured out that "flat-faced" doors--one where the doorslab faces the customer--fall out of the overhead. It also turns out that bookcasing doors is a more efficient way to sell them, but we had to kill some people to figure that out.

* We really need to work more on associate product knowledge.

* Some of our purchasing practices--specifically of lift trucks--need reevaluation. My store uses Raymond electric trucks and Toyota LPG trucks. The Raymond dealer is in Raleigh; the Toyota dealer is in Wilmington. OTOH, if we had Cat trucks the dealer is in Fayetteville. How much money per year could be saved by not bringing a technician from Wilmington every time something went wrong with a machine?

[Pirate Smile]

38. That is a lot more good news then I was expecting since I saw Home

Depot is a "red" store - at least that is what I thought the Buy Blue campaign said.

[jmowreader]

42. It's part of our union-avoidance campaign

I read somewhere once that a union boss said that any company that paid its employees a living wage, that provided them adequate benefits, and that treated them like human beings would never unionize--that there would be no need to.

By that metric, Home Depot will never unionize so long as it maintains its current personnel policies.

I've spoken before about our CEO, Bob Nardelli. We got him from GE. (This may explain why one-quarter of our board is GE board members.) When he came in, he did two things right off the bat--one very good, one not-so-good. The good thing is called Service Performance Improvement, or SPI. There are a lot of components to SPI, but the most important one is that all heavy restocking is done at night when it is feasible to do so. (It's not feasible to wait when someone wants 30 boxes of ceramic tile and there are 20 on the shelf.) Our lift truck safety standard says you have to close the working aisle, plus the aisle beside it, and post another associate to keep people from going into either aisle when the store is open. (If you're trying to stock toward the end of the aisles, or on the endcaps, you also have to block the racetrack.) By not doing this while the store is open, the customers are happier, we can stock shelves faster at night because we're not being interrupted by customers, and it's really far safer because people will walk right in front of your machine while you're bringing it down the aisle.

The not-so-good thing: when Bernie and Arthur started the company, they knew there was serious turnover in retail, but they also knew this business would require people who'd worked there half of forever. So they implemented longevity bonuses...at two years, five years and every five years after that, you would receive one hundred dollars for every year of service. Nardelli cancelled that--but only for people hired after he came in. If you were there when Bob Nardelli walked through the door, you still receive your bonus checks.

This company was founded 26 years ago in Atlanta, Georgia. The very first store we ever opened is still open (although it's been expanded) and some of the people who were there on grand opening day are still working there. It's a weird company: by its political contributions it's red, but by the way it works it's definitely blue.

[amazona]

14. when is the stock going back up to a decent level?

Inquiring minds need some insider information. :-)

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[jmowreader]

18. If I knew, my ESPP contribution would be higher than 2 percent!

This isn't exactly "insider information"--you can get it from any number of SEC filings--but it's good to know when trying to figure out why Home Depot stock doesn't move around much.

According to my last store manager, there are two major groups that hold our stock: employees of the company, and institutional investors. You'll find the stock in broad-market funds like index funds, and in mutual funds that invest in the building materials industry. About eight percent of the stock isn't in one of those two groups.

Employees and institutional investors have one thing in common: they buy and hold. Stocks that are bought and held, hold their value. We're a bit like the utilities of old: you didn't buy shares in the water works because you wanted to get rich quick but because you needed a safe investment. (This with the caveat that "safe investment" is right up there with "jumbo shrimp.")

The last time we really had a major correction in the price of our stock was a couple of years ago when the institutional investors decided we weren't spending enough on technology and dumped the stock. We spent and they came back.

I wish I had a better answer, but the stock doesn't move around much.

[amazona]

30. I hear that

It sure usedta move around much, she grumbled. But it's OK, I definitely believe in the long-term of this company. What is life without Home Depot?

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[Beer Snob-50]

19. how much wood would a woodchuck chuck

if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

[jmowreader]

25. One 2x4 every 30 seconds

or a 2x8 every minute.

[skippythwndrdog]

20. Why do HD's punches suck and why no 5/64th tension pins?

I want the truth!

[jmowreader]

23. Those punches do suck, don't they?

I bought my punch set from a company downtown that sells industrial supplies (Hurst Annaho--great company to deal with!) because hardware store punches uniformly suck. The good punches are only three times the price of the shitty ones, which might explain why it's so easy to get shitty ones.

And I have no idea why we don't have tension pins. Probably for the same reason we don't have strip door or scaffolding--we're not Grainger.

[skippythwndrdog]

26. You have tension pins...

just no 6/64ths size. Pisses me off. No other hardware store has them either. I want 5/64ths.

[greendog]

22. How many members of the HD board of directors...

...are also members of GE's board of directors. :wtf: is up with that?

[jmowreader]

32. I count three

Claudio Gonzalez: chairman and CEO, Kimberly-Clark de Mexico S.A.--on the boards of 10 different corporations

Kenneth Langone: president of Invemed, an investment bank--on the boards of five different corporations

Roger Penske: president of Penske Corporation--on the boards of three different corporations

I don't know if it will make you feel any better, but I've noticed that CEOs of big companies tend to be on multiple boards.

[onecent]

24. Are you working hours there as bad as Loews? My friend

started working at Loews and works 10 hour days - she works 5 days a week but rarely gets more than one day off at a time.

They lied to her when she was hired on but she feels trapped because they have insurance and she needs it. I can hardly shop at Loews because they work those poor people to death...and with all those hours it comes out below min. wage.

[jmowreader]

29. Lowe's is in a different situation than we are

I'm glad someone brought this up because there are serious differences between Home Depot and Lowe's as far as personnel compensation goes. (All of this is going to discuss store-level personnel; at district and above the rules are different.)

Home Depot has four levels of employee: associate, department supervisor (also known as department head), assistant store manager and store manager. Associates and department heads are on the clock--most of us are full-timers, which means we usually get 40 hours per week. Assistant store managers and store managers (the HR guy is considered store-manager level) are salaried, and they work at least 50 hours per week. They are very picky about us not working any overtime. I think we've all heard about the Wal-Mart "clock out, then come back and finish your work" thing. We do not do that; if it's time for you to leave and the task you're working on isn't finished, you find another associate in your department, brief that person on what needs to be done, clock out and leave. We are also especially picky about you taking your lunch hour. Your days off are contingent upon manning requirements, but we try to give you two days off in a row every week and we're usually fairly successful. (And check this one out: two weeks ago, I had Saturday through Tuesday off. That doesn't happen often and I probably won't get more than three weekend days off between March and October--they like having me in the building when the customer load is heaviest--so they're giving me a nice schedule now. I don't really mind having weekdays off; anything I might want to do I can do on the weekdays.)

Lowe's has the same four levels of employee, but their compensation system is different. Lowe's uses the "Salaried Plus Overtime Eligible Compensation System"--better known as Chinese overtime. How this works is pretty complex, and I'll have to use an example:

You are a Lowe's employee who earns $600 for 40 hours of work. This week, you worked 65 hours. To calculate your hourly rate for those extra 25 hours, they divide $600 by 65 to determine that you made $9.23 per hour. Dividing $9.23 in half gets you $4.62, which they will pay you for each of those 25 hours. (Assuming you could get authorized for 25 hours of overtime at Home Depot, we would divide the $600 by 40 to get $15 per hour, and pay you the usual time-and-a-half ($22.50) for the 25 overtime hours.) You as a Lowe's employee would receive $600 for the first 40 hours, plus $115.50 for the next 25, for a total check of $715.50--or $11.01 per hour. Which, for retail, ain't too shabby--except for the very minor sticking point that if you would have gotten your ass off the clock at 40 hours, you would have made $15 per hour. More fun: if you're doing a major steel-moving reset of your department and work 90 hours this week, you're getting $10 per hour.

Apparently, the associates who work in Lowe's specialty departments--flooring, wallpaper, appliances and millwork--are eligible for commissions. Commission payments are not calculated into this Chinese overtime shit.

Tell your friend that if she came to work for us, we have 8-hour days, no Chinese overtime AND insurance.

[amazona]

31. another ? about working there

I would love to work at Home Depot which, in my area, is constantly advertising for help, but even assuming I could get hired...is it easy or difficult to get vacation time WITHOUT PAY in the first year?

My issue is that I do get opportunities to travel quite frequently. I would like a job where, when an opportunity arises, I could take off without pay for a week or two, and still have the job. I am not asking to be paid each time a travel opportunity arises, as this would be ridiculous in my case, but I just want to know if taking unpaid vacations 4-5 times a year is a deal-breaker for HD.

I hesitate to even get started if all I would be doing is making a big nuisance of myself and screwing up everyone's planning.

My other issue is, I can't lift much above 25 pounds so perhaps it is the wrong place for me to begin with.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[jmowreader]

33. This is actually two questions

Question 1: it depends on your store's HR guy and on the staffing level at your building. But consider: HD is America's largest employer of moonlighting soldiers and Olympic athletes--two occupations where disappearing for a week at a time several times a year is nothing unusual. So long as they know the deal going in, there shouldn't be much of a problem.

Question 2: wallpaper doesn't weigh 25 pounds. Blinds don't weigh 25 pounds. A lot of electrical stuff doesn't weigh 25 pounds. We have departments where someone who can only lift 25 pounds can work.

[amazona]

35. ok -- thanks

Yes, they'll know the deal going in. I don't have a problem with letting them know because, heck, they would find out anyway.

I forgot about the Olympic athletes, that is cool.

This is good information, thank you so much!

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[bmovies]

27. When will they....

pay you a decent salary?

[jmowreader]

34. They already do.

[pintobean]

28. Do you carry

1 1/4" schedule 40 black iron pipe?

[jmowreader]

36. It's not in stock, but we can get it

If you have a plumbing supplier locally, you're usually better off going through them--it's going to take us two weeks to get it and many plumbing suppliers keep that in stock.

However! If you're doing steamfitting, forget Schedule 40 and go straight to Schedule 80; it will hold up much better.

[Kadie]

39. Why is everything orange?

Why did they pick orange?

[jmowreader]

44. It's a circusy color, and that's not by accident

When they were getting ready to open the first store, they needed signage. They went to a signpainter who somehow got hold of a roll of orange circus-tent fabric he couldn't give away, because who outside of a circus needs a thousand feet of blaze-orange canvas? The signpainter offered to give them a big, huge, massive discount if they'd let him paint their signs on that orange cloth.

And now everything in the building is orange.

[Lugnut]

40. I love Home Depot

Compared to Lowe's. The employees actually know what they're talking about and offer help. Lowe's employees seem to avoid customers who look befuddled. I also like the product selection better at HD.

We're stuck with a crappy Lowe's and the nearest HD is over 20 miles away. Is Home Depot planning any new construction in lower Luzerne Co PA?

[jmowreader]

52. I have no idea

If there's a sufficient population density and they think they can make money with a store there, they'll put one in eventually.

[Kingofalldems]

41. I see HD will install

floor coverings, countertops--just about anything. My question, does the customer get a good deal on this?

[jmowreader]

48. Because of the warranty, yes they do

The pricing is competitive, and we stand behind the install 100 percent.

Home Depot also has more stringent requirements for its installers than do other companies. You have to be in the install business either five or ten years before you can apply to install for us. You need a list of satisfied clients whose installs we can check. You need twice as much general liability insurance than the state you're in requires--in NC it's $1 million by statute, so we require $2 million, and that knocks out just about all your fly-by-night contractors immediately. And you have to pay us $10 for an "application fee" before we'll even start investigating you. In reality it probably costs us $500 to check you out before we accept you as a contractor, but it's to the good--we have very few complaints about our installs. (One that stands out is this Air Force major we installed a door for. He and his wife agreed to get a medium oak door and that she'd come down "the next day" to order it. When she walked in "the next day" she bought the light-oak door she really wanted. Well, the guy was pissed and started saying the install was screwed up so we'd remove the light-oak door she liked and replace it with a medium-oak door. He even said the door was "changing colors"--if it was a cherry door, I could believe it because cherry is photoreactive, but oak isn't photoreactive and neither is the urethane varnish the door company uses. We finally ordered him a new door and installed it just to make him happy. The story did have a semi-happy ending--the door in question was a double door, and we used it on our disabled veteran's house remodel project. And no, it hadn't changed colors.)

[achtung_circus]

43. Do you sell ABS pipe & fittings

or is that a Canadian thing?

[jmowreader]

45. It depends on the market

In North Carolina you're not supposed to use ABS pipe anymore, so we don't have it.

Home Depot Canada has it because it's allowed there.

[Worst Username Ever]

46. Do you require receipts for returns?

Because I have like 100 dollars worth or bathroom parts that I did not use, but I do not have a receipt.

[jmowreader]

49. We'll give store credit for that

You can bring the stuff back with no receipt so long as it's in salable condition and you bought it at Home Depot, but you'll get a store credit that you can use at any time in the future instead of cash or a credit back to your credit card.

Needless to say, lots of people get pissed about that (especially the ones who stole the thing they're returning from behind the building) so our managers all carry blank store credit cards around with them. When someone starts screaming loud enough that we've gotta call a manager, the manager will pull the store credit out of his pocket and say something like "they give me store credit, and I work here." (Actually, they don't give us store credit--we can't return things without a receipt, whereas you can.)

[Worst Username Ever]

50. That works for me, it's going to get spent there one way or another.

Thanks!

[Worst Username Ever]

47. Do you endorse the Home Depot flame thrower?

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=f827c9678e6c12e5db992c721eef704b&threadid=1107178&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

[jmowreader]

51. No, we really sell flamethrowers

It's this big-ass torch you connect to a 20-pound tank of propane, and it's usually used for things like melting the ice on your driveway. But it would make a decent flamethrower.

[Worst Username Ever]

53. How far would it shoot?

That, my friend, is the real question. Great thread, btw.

[jmowreader]

54. Ten to fifteen feet

It runs on propane so you're not going to get that neat GI Joe Flamethrower effect.

Weird thing...we have sold a SHITLOAD of these to units getting ready to deploy to Iraq.

Other popular items for deploying units include the Contico Tuff Bin--this neat molded-plastic box that's a little bigger than the old Army footlocker--and "all the six-foot chainlink fencing materials you have in the store." (This last one is especially popular among majors with Military Police brass on their collars. Hmm...I wonder what that's all about? :evilgrin:)

[Worst Username Ever]

57. ROFL Can't imagine why either! nt

[ornotna]

55. How come you guys don't

sell an accelerator to speed up the setting time for stucco?

[greblc]

56. What is their Health Plan like?

I work for Hollywood Video ours sucks! Retail...

[ZenLefty]

58. Plumbing Aisle Conundrum

Ever notice that all the customers in the plumbing section are in a foul mood? They're usually not there by choice. In fact, a minor catastrophe probably compelled them to go there in the first place. Especially if they're looking at toilet parts.

So, have you guys ever thought about selling beer and whiskey in the plumbing section? Please? We can do it, you can help.

[ALago1]

59. Hello There!

I have a question. I broke a leg of a wooden table (clean break straight down the middle) and want to know what adhesive to use to put it back together.

Awesome thread btw!

[Historic NY]

60. HD's install assistance, who do they get to do the work?

I need a new front door intstalled?

[DancingBear]

61. It's the warping, man -the warping!

How can Home Depot find 3/4" sheathing that, over a 4X8 span, can not only warp, but cup and twist - all at once!

Hell, it's not even real wood- just a bunch of layers glued together.

At least here in VA, the quality of wood at HD is so bad that I won't even go in there. I mill any stock I need from rough lumber, and I'll get birch ply from a hardwood dealer.

Seriosly, is any effort being made to improve quality?

Side note: thanks for the "insight" into the HD policies, BTW. I have been avoiding it for many months now due to its "red' status, but am glad to hear another side of the story.

[Maddy McCall]

62. Can you estimate how much it would cost me to build a 10x10 deck?

Thanks. :-)