Mike08

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    • Home Depot Slows Down Expansion; Still Losing Customers to Lowes [view article]
      Truth is HD has hurt itself by opening & flooding each area with too many stores. Waste of money and doesn't really improve the overall sales of each store. It only reduces the total amount of sales of each store at the end of the day. Don't even factor in prices of products, if the product is the same Lowes will price match and beat it by 10%. Appliances? Lowes is the #2 appliances seller behind Sears. Each store pretty much has instock appliances of the displays there and can Special Order hundreds of others. Not really even a good comparison to say every store of each company is the exact same. One HD store may do really better than a Lowes stores in one area and vice versa in another area. Even by amount of sales of stores, a Lowes store will make much more daily than a HD store, due to "cannibalization&... method. You usually have 1 Lowes store compared to 3 or more HD stores in the same area. Customer Service will vary from store to store. Lowes does tend to cater to the "non contractor" retail customers and HD tend to cater to the contractors. Associates? You will often find that both companies will be very very quick to hire the former worker or recruit from each other(often due to less training involved and quick placement on the salesfloor for customer service). HD & Lowes, both got caught up in a buying spree(buying companies that were often suppliers), which both were not really in any position to really run the supply companies. Most customers & shareholders don't even realize that both companies actually stock products that are bought from each other. For some odd reason seems like the "corporate level" thought they could put the squeeze on each other & not notice it would be putting the squeeze on their biggest buyer. As you can probably tell I am an employee of one(Lowes). I have more than a few family members that work for both companies from associates to management. Truth be told, both places are warehouses that sell just about the same products. And no Lowes does not want to be like HD at all. We like our customer base to be the "non contractor" customer and I think HD bread and butter is contractors. True enough HD is our competition but that doesn't mean we want them out of business. Thats just not American and the consumer really benefits from it with getting the best value and eventually best service for the battle of their repeat business. Also, money wise, I do own stock in both companies! May 07 03:12 AM
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