Posted on 01/03/2007 3:49:14 PM PST by seacapn
Bob Nardelli abruptly resigned as chairman and chief executive of The Home Depot Inc. after six years at the.....
I'm no longer there either tang-soo. I worked there from '78 until early '04 ... then our business was sold off (as many have been). All I know is ... if the salaried people produced the results Immelt has, they'd be forced-ranked near the bottom.
People who quit their jobs don't get bonuses, either.
Nardelli was the biggest mistake HD ever made. The loss of stock value is his fault.
In that wonderful 20-20 hindsight, I wish I'd worked summers at Home Depot in high school, back when it was mostly a local chain. They gave every employee stock options when they first went public, and there are quite a few folks who are retired millionaires in their 30s and 40s because they stocked shelves or drove a truck 20-odd years ago.
He walks away with an average of $80,000,000(eighty-million) per year service at HD.
Esta noche
Home Depot does not treat employees fair anyhow.
Case in point; my husband worked for Home Depot for 7 years. Then on Dec. 1, he found a new and better paying job. He gave plenty of notice and planned to work until Dec. 29.
However, he was terminated 1.5 weeks ahead of schedule. The reason: Home Depot needed to "lower their overhead and cut hours" to make their end of year figures look good.
And unbeknownst to me until about a week ago; my husband said that Home Depot required all employees to sign a document stating that they can be terminated at any time for any reason.
Gee, that really encourages loyalty and pride in one's work!
Home Depot doesn't get Medicare dollars. How about United Health Care's McQuire and his 123 Million a year and 2 Billion dollar stock options that were backdated?
I don't get that complaint. The stock went up about 2% on the news, but it was already just a buck short of breaking a 52 week high.
I think people just did not like his investment in NASCAR, and his compensation.
Hey, did you actually read the follow-up to that man gets glued to toilet bowl story? Turns out, this is not the FIRST TIME!! LOL! The guy's a looney tune!
I also prefer Lowe's. I think a big part of it is that, as another company used to advertise, as #2 they have to try harder.
When I lived in a condo, I filled one wall with bookcases -- I didn't have a good place to set up sawhorses, and running a circular saw would probably have violated the lease and definitely have annoyed the neighbors, so I had my 1x12s cut at the store. 6' sides, 2' shelves, held together with countersunk screws.
At a glance, you could spot the bookcases I had cut at Home Despot vs. the ones I had cut at Lowe's -- HD employees had a lot more variance in their definition of "two-foot lengths," so those shelves have a lot more warp and bowing in the sides. The ones cut at Lowe's are closer to square (none of them are especially pretty, because I was going for purely functional; I could have used good hardwwod, cut to spec myself and used glue and dowels, but I was just trying to get my books out of boxes).
Alas, I live in Atlanta, where HD was close to a monopoly for about 20 years. Lowe's has made inroads in the last several years, and in that wonderful way that competition works, they not only came in and did better, but forced Home Depot to get better.
HD is closer, and I go there if I know exactly what I want, but if I need help or advice it's infuriatingly difficult to flag down an orange apron, and unlikely they'll know anything when I do. Lowe's is better for that.
Ace Hardware is better still -- They vary from one to another, but the common factor is that they always seem to have three or four middle-aged guys milling around in the back who, between them, know everything about everything.
A couple of years ago, I was installing a kitchen sink, and the hot water supply line was a serious pain in my butt. The copper pipe was right up against a wood joist. That meant that I couldn't get the torch around to heat evenly and I had to work the torch carefully, because I didn't want to set my house on fire. "Don't set your house on fire" is pretty much my #2 priority for any DIY project. #1 is "Don't get yourself or anyone else killed."
Three failed attempts and three popped solder joints later, after a week of cold showers because I'd had to cut off the hot water at the source, one of the guys at Ace introduced me to the wonders of compression fittings. If I were a better man, I'd remember his name and send him a fruit basket each Christmas.
As variable as they are -- Ace is a franchise -- every Ace location seems to have the aforementioned middle-aged guys, a kid in his late teens or early 20s who's just learning how to cut keys, and a cute teenaged girl working the register. It's almost eerie how consistent that is. They have a smaller selection and higher prices than the big-box stores, but I consider that a premium I pay for the advice.
Hey if they don't provide good service, there is always LOWES. :)
I have to say, I admire the hell out of Arthur and Bernie. Arthur wants to renovate the Georgia Dome on his own dime, not extorting taxpayers to pay for it. Bernie spent years studying aquaria and built a world-class one so he could give it away. They're menschy on the same scale as Candler, Woodruff and Carnegie.
I'm a truck driver who has to deliver the suppliers freight to the HD's in the Chicago metro area and I'll tell ya, they are the worst. If my appt. for the 1 or 2 skids of freight is at 1400, They will only take it at 1400.
Not 1 before 2. Not 1 after 2. But, 2. (Sorry I regress from my Python memories)
Receiving areas are the dirtiest, cluttered, and unsafe I've ever seen. Employees are bitter. The place is like Fort Knox because of all the theft out the back door. Drivers are seldom allowed on the dock to verify the unloading procedure, but instead are confined to a 8x8 cage with a cut out to pass the paperwork through. Reminds me of a jail meal slot.
Now Menard's and Lowe's are pleasant to deliver to. I wonder why?
Let me get this straight; the guy drives his company's stock into the toilet, and gets a $210M payday in return?
That's not free enterprise, that's piracy.
Quite a few CEOs have resigned lately, statistically. However, they're taking huge amounts of money with them. Stock market may decline drastically, but these guys will have plenty of bucks to "reinvest". Something to watch.
Yup. Atlanta sucks. It's a swirling vortex straight to the ninth circle of Hell. No sane person would ever want to move here so they could suffer the torments of the damned. It's hot, it's humid, and it's populated by the white folks who were rejected from the casting call for "Deliverance" and the black folks who were too scary for "New Jack City."
SO WHEN, EXACTLY, CAN WE EXPECT THE YANKEES TO STOP COMING?
http://www.sfstation.com/esta-noche-b2302
Must be one of your hang-outs
It takes talent to shoot hoops or hit fastballs. Only a few people in the world have that kind of talent. On the other hand, you could replace any given big-corporate CEO with a jar of mayonnaise for a month and no one would notice.
Guys like Mr. Home Despot have but one talent: convincing people to give them large sums of money for nothing. In other words, they're con artists. And since the rules of the economic game are set up by con artists to reward con artists, it appears to the rest of us that they deserve every dime they swindle. They make for us a kleptocracy and call it free enterprise.
The only solution is to rewrite the game rules to benefit small family businesses instead of gigantic joint-stock corporations. But of course we won't do that -- until we have no other choice.
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