Home Depot outdoor shopping complete failure

TEMPE, AZ — Home Depot, the big-box hardware giant, has eliminated all 126 of its outdoor shopping facilities effective immediately.

Justin Crell,  South West Regional Manager, made the announcement to his team at a closed door meeting early this morning at the Tempe Administrative Center.

Crell stated that, “Preliminary studies suggested that our shoppers would be much more relaxed in an outdoor setting without artificial lighting. Unfortunately, we’ve found that many customers were prone to relax beyond a point acceptable to our core values”.

While revenues for the first quarter of 2011 began to spike in concert with the warming weather, there were too many “incidents” which apparently disturbed regular customers.

“The intentions were fine”, added Crell. “But we just had too many people basically just ‘hanging around’ relaxing – sort of like the old ‘bookstore / coffee shop’ model. Our outdoor sections began to look like the outside storefront, you know, with lots of people just basically standing around”.

A past Tart News Business feature included interviews with random shoppers at an outdoor facility. Most found the experience positive, particularly while testing items from the landscape section. Julio Cruz, questioned while testing a product commented, “They never let me try out this chainsaw indoors – too much smoke and noise. But outdoors, I can test all kinds of stuff, like power augers and riding mowers – all for free”. Cruz left the outdoor facility without making a purchase.