Feeling Peaky
The news that Home Depot CEO Ted Decker is taking a medical leave deserves only good wishes for his recovery. Unfortunately, Home Depot itself has appeared to be in need of medical attention for considerably longer as any customer who visits that store often will attest to. Decker became CEO in 2022, just as the pandemic home-improvement bacchanal was ending, and the company has since spent three years explaining that high interest rates, supply chain issues, tariff snafus and a frozen housing market have discouraged Americans from remodeling their kitchens and bathrooms. This is undoubtedly true and also the corporate equivalent of a patient explaining that the reason he feels terrible is the ghastly weather while ignoring several years of increasingly alarming lab results.
Home Depot’s response to its ailments has been to pursue professional contractors more aggressively, which makes strategic sense but turns the company dependent on people who already know exactly what they need so the rest of the customer population becomes largely irrelevant. The ordinary homeowner, is therefore left to their own devices, rummaging through seventeen varieties of an object adjacent to the one required, and beginning an expedition in search of an employee who might be able to shed some light. In HQ this may be called “customer empowerment" but to that hapless homeowner with a broken toilet, the store feels like an escape room where the prize is a plumbing fitting.
The company would reasonably argue that it cannot manufacture lower mortgage rates or persuade homeowners to move. But great retailers are supposed to discover reasons for customers to visit even when the macroeconomic gods are grossly uncooperative if not downright hostile. Home Depot feels like a company waiting patiently for America to start renovating again, secure in the knowledge that eventually people will require 600 feet of lumber and have no plausible alternative. I know I've been relying on alternatives for a while now because folks like me are no longer the customer persona that Home Depot serves unless I am there looking for herbs to plant in my yard.
Home Depot’s response to its ailments has been to pursue professional contractors more aggressively, which makes strategic sense but turns the company dependent on people who already know exactly what they need so the rest of the customer population becomes largely irrelevant. The ordinary homeowner, is therefore left to their own devices, rummaging through seventeen varieties of an object adjacent to the one required, and beginning an expedition in search of an employee who might be able to shed some light. In HQ this may be called “customer empowerment" but to that hapless homeowner with a broken toilet, the store feels like an escape room where the prize is a plumbing fitting.
The company would reasonably argue that it cannot manufacture lower mortgage rates or persuade homeowners to move. But great retailers are supposed to discover reasons for customers to visit even when the macroeconomic gods are grossly uncooperative if not downright hostile. Home Depot feels like a company waiting patiently for America to start renovating again, secure in the knowledge that eventually people will require 600 feet of lumber and have no plausible alternative. I know I've been relying on alternatives for a while now because folks like me are no longer the customer persona that Home Depot serves unless I am there looking for herbs to plant in my yard.
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Reflections