Why Wasn't Do-it-yourself a Thing Before Home Depot?
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal say do-it-yourself was not a real way to shop before Home Depot, because a homeowner could not trust one place to stock a whole deck, a bathroom, or another project. Little hardware stores left the shopper hoping for good luck.
Lowe's, a company out of North Carolina, was the biggest operator in hardware and still was not the Lowe's people know today. It had evolved from the general store concept. Store footprints were a fifth or less the size of a modern Lowe's and sat mostly in strip malls. The whole company was only doing about $150 million in annual revenue. In their understanding, each store was a hardware store with a small showroom, without concrete floors and giant ceilings, attached to a lumberyard.
Lowe's was founded in 1921 as a general store, so the company was already 50 years old before Home Depot was founded.
