Home Depot Opened With Empty Cans and Scuffed Floors
Broke and nearly invisible on day one, the founders faked abundance until customers believed it.
Acquired · The Home DepotAround 4 a.m. on opening day, Pat Farrah, who had asked for borrowed boxes to fill the shelves, walked into the first Atlanta store and lost his temper. The linoleum floors had been polished to a shine.
The two store managers had hired a night crew to surprise the founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, two recently fired hardware executives starting over with almost no cash. Their new stores were not grand warehouses but reused discount spaces with low ceilings and Kmart style racks.
The founders needed those modest rooms to feel big, busy, and full, because abundance was the entire promise. Home Depot planned to carry far more goods at lower prices than any hardware shop, but on opening week it could not afford to buy enough inventory to prove it.
A newspaper advertising mix-up had already left almost no one knowing the stores were open. Marcus and his floor workers stood in the parking lot offering passersby free one dollar bills just to come inside.
To Farrah, a gleaming floor made the problem worse. A pristine store looked unused, not like a work site where contractors in boots grabbed supplies in the middle of a project. He woke Marcus and Blank, and the three drove forklifts in circles to scuff the linoleum, and someone scattered sawdust for effect.
Marcus later summed up the rule in four words: "Our stores are action places."
The same illusion was stacked on the shelves. A week before opening, Farrah had borrowed 500 cabinet boxes from a cabinet supplier, and crews stayed up all night folding and racking them. Each store also piled 2,000 empty paint cans ten feet high, with small labels so clerks would not try to sell them.
The founders even filmed themselves walking the aisles, delighted at how, in their words, "fabulously legitimate" the stocked shelves looked.
The theater worked. Within a couple of months the kinks were ironed out and the stores began to hum. By year end the company had three Atlanta stores and 7 million dollars in sales in about six months of operation.
Questions people ask
Why were the founders so short on cash?
Marcus ran a hardware chain called Handy Dan, with Blank as his finance chief, until both were fired. With little cash to stock huge stores, they timed supplier deliveries close to opening and sold inventory quickly, so suppliers effectively helped finance the shelves.
Did Home Depot keep the rough look?
Not exactly. The first stores were reused discount spaces with low ceilings and Kmart style racks, and they looked nothing like the Home Depot known today. The rough, busy work site feel was the goal on opening day.
How big did the company get?
It grew from those three Atlanta stores into a national chain. Early tricks gave way to real scale, with bulk buying and broad selection doing what empty paint cans once pretended to do.