Opposition Growing to Home Depot

With more than 500 stores in the United States and Canada, Home Depot is the world's largest home-improvement chain and ranks among the 10 largest retailers in the United States. A visitor to one of Home Depot's airplane hangar-sized stores can find about 50,000 kinds of building materials, home improvement supplies, and lawn and garden equipment.

The hardware giant clearly has global aspirations: it recently opened its first store outside of North America in Santiago, Chile.

"The pent-up demand for home improvement materials and information as provided by The Home Depot makes Chile the ideal country in which to kick off our international expansion," said Arthur M. Blank, President and Chief Operating Officer in a Jan. 28 press release.

The company has also been studying other potential international sites, including Asia and Europe, according to the press release. But grassroots opposition to Home Depot's continuing expansion in the United States is increasing.

The letter, from the ominous-sounding Crossroads Government Acquisition and Relocation Specialists, informed them that they would be evicted and that the park would be torn down to make way for a new Home Depot super store.

"The letter said they were just going to level the park...It was so cruel," Cress said. She felt badly for her low-income neighbors, most of whom were in their eighties and nineties. "There is no place within 25 miles from here that these people could even afford," said the 59-year-old Cress.

After recovering from the initial shock, community members dug in their heels and vowed to fight the Atlanta-based retailer. They won the overwhelming support of the Santa Rosa community and the city council, and Home Depot eventually backed down following a bitter four-month battle.

Santa Rosa is one of a growing number of communities that is choosing to stand up and fight the aggressive tactics of "big-box" retail chains like Home Depot, which critics say suck money out of local communities, crush neighborhood businesses, and treat workers badly.

"Home Depot is wrecking our industry," says Ben Cassinerio of Diablo Timber, a lumberyard in Napa Valley. Cassinerio takes Home Depot's aggression personally. He is spearheading a campaign against the retailer on behalf of independent lumberyards, which are being decimated by what Cassinerio says are monopoly practices. His crusade began after one of his main suppliers, Louisiana-Pacific, entered into an exclusive relationship with Home Depot.

"Louisiana-Pacific dropped me and every other independent wholesaler they have been dealing with for the past 30 years for Home Depot," he said. "I couldn't buy a stick from them."

Since then, Cassinerio has studied Home Depot's practices. He maintains that the company's stated goal is to eliminate all retail competition and that of wholesalers who stand between them and manufacturers.

He points to a motivational skit put on by Home Depot management soon after the opening of one of its Northern California stores. The skit, he says, portrayed a hospital patient on life support. The patient wears the name of one of the store's competitors. "The Home Depot doctor takes the patient's pulse, pulls the plug and proclaims, 'Another competitor is dead. Get this body out of here.'"

While hardware is Home Depot's most obvious retail victim, it is not the only one. The company is known in the retail industry as a "category-killer," which means it eliminates whole categories of industries, including carpeting, paint, drapery, electrical and plumbing supply, and garden centers. It does this, critics say, by buying its merchandise in huge quantities, and selling it at prices far below what smaller businesses can compete with.

Home Depot denies that it has a negative economic impact on the communities where it operates.

Amy Friend, the chain's west coast spokesperson, says the arrival of Home Depot has the opposite effect on small business. "What we've actually found in a lot of markets when we move in is that the small businesses tend to do better than they did when we came to town."

One reason for that, Friend says, is that Home Depot offers classes in home improvement, which makes people more comfortable with the "do-it-yourself" concept. That, she says, increases business for everyone.

Supporters also claim that Home Depot brings hundreds of badly needed jobs. Few job studies have been done on Home Depot, but the data on Wal-Mart, another giant "category killer," suggests that big-box retailers often do not deliver on their job-creation claims.

In Greenfield, Massachusetts, Wal-Mart promised local residents it would create 177 jobs over 10 years. But after independent economists and retail experts examined those claims, local business leaders concluded that only eight new, lower paying jobs would be created after jobs lost through the displacement of existing businesses were taken into account.

"Everybody in the industry knows that Home Depot is a job killer," Norman says. "I always have to laugh when politicians and these local zoning boards start talking about Home Depot as if it's a form of economic development."

Among the communities Norman is tracking that either have recently fought or are fighting battles with Home Depot include Yarmouth and Leominster in Massachusetts, North Greenbush in New York, North Olmsted in Ohio, Nashua in New Hampshire, and Riverside and Windsor in California.

Home Depot is also no friend of unions, either. Its union-free philosophy is made clear in its 1996 Orientation Handbook that was excerpted in a recent edition of Construction Labor News: "We believe that Home Depot associates are much better off remaining union-free rather than dealing with third-party outsiders. We believe outsiders would destroy the open and direct communication we have with our associates. Home Depot is strongly opposed to union organizing and will resist organizing attempts by unwanted outsiders."

The hardware giant is also the target of a class action, sex bias lawsuit, which is set to go to trial in San Francisco at the end of this year. The suit charges the company with systematically failing to promote, train, or fairly compensate its female employees.

"This is a company whose advertisement says, 'Good things happen when Home Depot comes to town'," Norman says. "I think there are a lot of people who would disagree with that."