Well I am not sure what I did to tick off the good folks at Home Depot (The Home Depot, Inc.
(Public, NYSE:HD), but it is clear that they are not big fans of our little enterprise in Houston, Texas. This story is about the Home Depot that is located close to iFLOOR Houston.
Let me say that in general I know there are lots of great people at the Home Depot. And we have sent thousands of customers there to tie off the loose ends of their flooring projects or to get tools related to the flooring installation or whatever. (Although if you are shopping for hardware online check out www.cornerhardware.com as a great alternative.)
I have maintained for years that they are a great source for tools and other general home improvement needs, but I personally believe that flooring in something that should be dealt with by specialists. The fine people working at HD often find themselves moving from department to department without specific training in their new area of responsibility. It doesn’t matter if it is lighting, appliances, flooring, hardware, tools, garden or whatever the area is; there are skills and knowledge, let’s call it experience and focus that can help customers get to the right solution. By the way I think Lowes is also equally capable of helping folks with tools, gardening and that other stuff, but they are equally weak on flooring compared to a specialist. My point I guess is leave flooring to the professionals.
Before you send me a flaming message, let me acknowledge MANY MANY experienced flooring professionals at the Home Depot and Lowes, but the chances of finding one in the flooring department that is available when the average customer shows up to shop for flooring I think is about as likely as hitting the 10,000 dollar scratch ticket that you can buy from the local gas station. Not bloody likely.
I do believe that their continued focus on the flooring category will only continue to advance their knowledge and capabilities in the future therefore my job remains a tough one to stay ahead of the competition. I think that all flooring specialists will continue to face a challenge from big boxes despite their currently tiny share of the total flooring market.
Ok, so what got me on this rant? Well we opened a store in Houston, Texas not long ago. And I am not going to deny that having a location close to a big traffic generator is a logical part of our real estate concept. Costco, Ikea, Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart or whatever is a natural traffic generator. Now am I giving away a million dollar secret? Maybe. I doubt it. Floor Covering Weekly published an article in 2002 that basically quoted a dealer saying get as close as you can to a Home Depot and let them drive customers to you.
That article was often credited with annoying Home Depot executives so much that they started opening the “The Flooring Store” by Home Depot near their own locations. They recently decided to close all of those locations to refocus on their core business, which by the way I think is very smart. Anyway that’s another story. But my question is, “Is opening a location in the vicinity of a Home Depot enough to tick them off?” If so do they ask who they tick off when they open a new location? This is still America baby and we can open wherever we want! We try to be friendly with our neighbors including the competitors, but let the customer chose where they ultimately want to buy.
So here we are a little company just trying to put food on the table and we open in Houston, Texas with some great folks leading the iFLOOR charge. The location is brand new and owned by a really cool contractor landlord and is very close the freeway and the Home Depot. It is great on so many levels.
So we are minding our own business and growing iFLOOR Houston in a very impressive way right out of the gates and suddenly we get a call from our Houston location. They report that Home Depot is blocking our back entrance driveway which is where we unload our trucks. Our trucks have to physically drive through the HD parking lot to back into the loading area. Well HD decided that they no longer wish to have that happen. So they blocked us with pallets of concrete blocks. Many pallets.
We can no longer get trucks into that location through the back, however, I am proud to report that Cleo, Kevin, Deric and Roman are getting it done ANYWAY. They were not intimidated. No, they just load through the front doors. Inconvenient? Sure. A game changer? Not a chance.
Our resolve has only increased.
I have pasted the Google Maps Sat view below to illustrate how close we are to the HD and below you can see the photos of where they blocked our access. But the resilient team of iFLOOR Houston took out the forklift and raised our banners. We will have parking lot sales, balloons, signage and anything else we can do to resist being hammered by the big orange store. We will not surrender!
You can see in this photo the stacks of pallets that Big Orange stacked in front of Little Orange. 
