The Home Depot: A Competitor’s Strategic Audit, A Case Study

Akhtiara Erskine, Angelo A. Camillo, Alicia J. Bajada and Svetlana Holt

Chapter Chapter 23 in Global Enterprise Management, 2015, pp 171-189 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The Home Depot, Inc. (Home Depot) was founded in 1978 by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank with the help of investment banker Ken Langone and merchandising expert Pat Farrah. The vision was of a one-stop shopping location for the do-it-yourselfer, and the idea materialized with the opening of the first two Home Depot stores on June 22, 1979, in Atlanta, Georgia. The first stores, each at around 60,000 square feet and carrying an inventory of over 25,000 items, were far larger than the average hardware stores of the time. However, the idea was not new in Europe. In 1962, Heinz-Georg Baus, a resident of Mannheim, Germany, had the idea of bringing all hardware specialty stores together under one roof. He had been looking for tools and building materials, and was continually frustrated by having to drive to numerous stores to find what he needed. The same year, he opened the first store called Bauhaus in Mannheim, with an inventory of about 25,000 products in a building measuring about 2, 691 square feet. Today, the German company has over 250 stores in 17 European and Near-Eastern countries (Bauhaus, 2014). Sixteen years later, Home Depot revolutionized the home improvement industry in North America by bringing the know-how and the tools to the consumer, and saving them money in the process.

Keywords: Supply Chain; Customer Service; Profitability Ratio; Customer Experience; Swot Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-51070-9_11

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137510709

DOI: 10.1057/9781137510709_11

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().