Why Did Home Depot Stack Empty Paint Cans?
Ben Gilbert says the first Home Depot stores stacked empty paint cans because they could not afford a full warehouse and still needed to look like one. The first two Atlanta stores opened on June 22, 1979, inside old discount-store space. The night before, managers had the linoleum polished. Pat Farrah arrived around 4 a.m., decided a clean floor looked unused, and had Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank scuff it with forklifts. Bernie later wrote that the stores were action places, meant for people in work boots in the middle of a job.
A week before opening they also lacked merchandise. Pat borrowed about 500 empty boxes, and the crew folded them overnight so the racks looked full. He found about 2,000 empty paint cans for each store, marked them so nobody would sell them, and stacked them 10 feet high. The opening was rough, including a missed newspaper ad and staff handing out dollar bills in the parking lot. By the end of 1979 a third Atlanta store was open, and the first six months of sales were about $7 million.
