Home Depot To Sell Business Supply Division, Focus On Retail
Thank goodness! There may be hope for Home Depot! From the NYT:
Home Depot has agreed to sell its Home Depot Supply Unit to three private equity firms -- Bain Capital, the Carlyle Group and Clayton Dubilier & Rice for $10.3 billion, the buyers announced this afternoon, confirming a report by DealBook.Yay! Home Depot's troubled supply division has long been fingered as the cause of their notoriously crappy customer service. One can only assume that resources once diverted to the business supply division can now be refocused on consumers. Let's hope that's how it goes. —MEGHANN MARCO
Home Depot To Sell Business Supply Division For $10 Billion [NYT]
(Photo: Mr. Oliver)
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Comments:
Wait, so the horrible customer service from the business division can be heaped upon the astonishingly bad regular customer service to create a mega-crap salad of multiple erroneous items delivered to people suffering for months without working kitchens.
Brilliant!
finally...shareholders needed this.
The Carlyle Group?
Will installation of kitchen cabinets be subcontracted to The Illuminati?
@SexCpotatoes: mega-crap salad. that's classic.
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after spending a saturday price shopping for some tools & such that i needed, i realized why i curse home depot every time i go there. no price tags. wrong price tags. no reps that can tell me what a price is. so, i walk to checkout w/ a cart full of items that i end up not buying b/c they're more expensive than anywhere else i've seen them. ARGH!
big boxes used to be good for deals. basic premise: buying power = lower cost per unit = lower prices. this may be true on some items still, but not so much as a whole. i was looking for about a dozen items in particular & the local hardware stores beat out the depot on every item.
why? maybe b/c these small stores need every square inch of room they have. they can't afford to overprice merchandise simply to upsell more-expensive product. there's no b.s. value-price structure which goads you into climbing the steps from a stripped-down "bargain" to the $300 "all-in-one".
This is interesting considering they just bought out Hughes Supply, one of if not the biggest supply companies in Florida.
Someone could fill a Consumerist-like website with all the misstatements made when Consumerist editors talk about real-world business:
Home Depot's troubled supply division has long been fingered as the cause of their notoriously crappy customer service.
The Supply business served only professionals at non-retail locations -- so how exactly did it cause crappy customer service at the retail locations?
Home Depot's foray into the contractor supply market was doomed once they started heavy marketing of their installation services. How did they think they were going to sell supplies to contractors and compete with them at the same time? One or the other had to fail.
Nah, the resources are going into financial engineering shenanigans: stock buybacks.
Nardelli bought a company called Maintenance Warehouse & changed the name after a few years.
MH was great, they had a terrific catalog, all sorts of parts for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance parts that other places charged a fortune for & free shipping.
Then Nardelli screwed it up like everything else he touched.
Blame Nardelli for being an incompetent jerk that was pissed off because he didn't get Neutron Jack's job at GE!
Not any other person or part of the company!
I'd more expect those resources to be refocused on the CEO's bank accounts.