Free Essays on Home Depot

Home Depot stores offer a broad assortment of merchandise and services, and serve three primary customer groups: do-it-yourself customers, do-it-for-me customers and professional customers. A typical Home Depot store stocks approximately 40,000 to 50,000 product items, including variations in color and size. Major product groups include building materials, lumber and millwork; plumbing, electrical and kitchen; hardware and seasonal, and paint, flooring and wall coverings. To complement the national brand name products it offers, the Company has formed strategic alliances with vendor partners to market products under brand names that are only offered through The Home Depot. As of fiscal year-end 2001, the Company offered products under more than 30 proprietary and other exclusive brands, including Thomasville kitchen and bathroom cabinets; RIDGID power tools; Behr Premium Plus paint; Mill's Pride cabinets; GE SmartWater water heaters, and Vigoro fertilizer. Founded in 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer currently operating 1,459 stores, including 1,312 Home Depot stores, 50 EXPO Design Centers, one Floor Store and three HD Landscape Supply stores in the United States, 84 Home Depot stores in seven Canadian provinces, seven Home Depot stores in Puerto Rico and ten in Mexico. The company reported net sales for fiscal 2001 of $53.6 billion and employs approximately 280,000 people. The Home Depot is credited as being the innovator in the home improvement retail industry by combining the economies of scale inherent in a warehouse format with a level of customer service unprecedented among warehouse-style retailers. Home Depot stores cater to do-it-yourselfers, as well as home improvement, construction and building maintenance professionals. Each Home Depot store stocks approximately 40,000 to 50,000 different kinds of building materials, home improvement supplies and lawn an... Free Essays on Home Depot Free Essays on Home Depot Home Depot stores offer a broad assortment of merchandise and services, and serve three primary customer groups: do-it-yourself customers, do-it-for-me customers and professional customers. A typical Home Depot store stocks approximately 40,000 to 50,000 product items, including variations in color and size. Major product groups include building materials, lumber and millwork; plumbing, electrical and kitchen; hardware and seasonal, and paint, flooring and wall coverings. To complement the national brand name products it offers, the Company has formed strategic alliances with vendor partners to market products under brand names that are only offered through The Home Depot. As of fiscal year-end 2001, the Company offered products under more than 30 proprietary and other exclusive brands, including Thomasville kitchen and bathroom cabinets; RIDGID power tools; Behr Premium Plus paint; Mill's Pride cabinets; GE SmartWater water heaters, and Vigoro fertilizer. Founded in 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer currently operating 1,459 stores, including 1,312 Home Depot stores, 50 EXPO Design Centers, one Floor Store and three HD Landscape Supply stores in the United States, 84 Home Depot stores in seven Canadian provinces, seven Home Depot stores in Puerto Rico and ten in Mexico. The company reported net sales for fiscal 2001 of $53.6 billion and employs approximately 280,000 people. The Home Depot is credited as being the innovator in the home improvement retail industry by combining the economies of scale inherent in a warehouse format with a level of customer service unprecedented among warehouse-style retailers. Home Depot stores cater to do-it-yourselfers, as well as home improvement, construction and building maintenance professionals. Each Home Depot store stocks approximately 40,000 to 50,000 different kinds of building materials, home improvement supplies and lawn an... Free Essays on Home Depot Basic Company and Industry Information Bernie Marcus and Author Blank founded Home Depot in Georgia in 1978. The first few stores were attached to Treasure Island stores and stocked around 25,000 products. What started out as a small neighborhood hardware store soon sprouted as the largest home improvement store in the nation. It wasn’t before long that Home Depot (HD) shares were being traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, Home Depot is a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and is one of the â€Å"Top Ten Most Admired Companies† by Fortune magazine, which also ranked The Home Depot as â€Å"America’s Most Admired Specialty Retailer† for the seventh consecutive year. This company only goes up with increasing net sales and net profit. The main ingredient to Home Depot’s success is not only the number of stores there are, but the diverse types of customers they attract. Home Depot attracts contractors, other retail stores, the do it yourselfer, and the average John Doe shopper. Home Depot is also attracting more and more women by increasing and expanding their EXPO Design stores which focuses on wall paper and other types of remodeling. So, whether you’re a contractor looking for lumber to build a house or John Doe who just broke his door handle and is looking to buy a new one, the Home Depot is your one stop superstore. What makes the Home Depot such a pleasant place to shop is the 201,000 friendly and knowledgeable sales associates. Home Depot forces their employees through a rigorous training program to ensure that which ever department they work in, they know the products they’re selling and have the customer service skills to sell it. Home Depot offers their employee’s stock options and 401(k) retirement plans. On the whole, this is just a few of the many reasons why Home Depot has such a low turnover rate on the average when being compared to other large retail chains. Even though Home D...

Artist vs. Artisan

Artist vs. Artisan Artist vs. Artisan Artist vs. Artisan By Mark Nichol What’s the difference between an artist and an artisan? This unnecessarily sensitive question is equivalent to the issue of what constitutes art and what is designated as craft. In both cases, the former word essentially refers to the making of tangible or intangible products as an expression of creativity and imagination for purely aesthetic reasons. An artisan, meanwhile, though spurred by the same impulses, produces crafts, which, though they may be acquired only for decoration, are designed to be practical. Therefore, though some tension between artist and artisan between producers of art and designers of crafts may exist because of a perceived differential in their relative cultural status, the technical definitions are just that: precise distinctions not in quality or artistic achievement but in function. The word for the creator of art is the gender-neutral term artist. (The French form of the word, artiste, came to apply more broadly to creative professionals, especially performers, though it also has a pejorative sense of â€Å"pretentious artist.†) By extension, one talented in any endeavor even a con artist may earn the term. By contrast, makers of crafts have gender-specific labels craftsman and craftswoman but though craftsperson is the natural neutral term, many such practitioners prefer to be called artisans. (The Latin ancestor of this term is artire, which means â€Å"to instruct in the arts.†) Other words that ultimately derive from the Latin word ars (â€Å"art†) include artifact, which comes from the Italian word artifatto and ultimately from the Latin terms arte and factum (meaning â€Å"thing made†), originally having primarily an archaeological sense but now referring to anything left behind or remaining, and artifice, which originally meant workmanship but, from a secondary sense of â€Å"cunning,† came to refer to deceit or trickery. (However, artificer remains a synonym for artisan, although it can also refer to one who contrives or makes things or ideas.) Artificial, the adjectival form of artifice, broadly refers to anything not produced in nature. Artful once referred exclusively to artistic skill but later primarily came to mean â€Å"dexterous, wily†; in that sense, the term is best known in the moniker of the Artful Dodger, an adroit young pickpocket in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist. The antonym, artless, likewise was originally a reference to a lack of talent but now usually refers to clumsiness in word or deed. Arty and artsy both describe artists, but the terms have developed a pejorative sense of pretension, and artsy is hyphenated in combination with craftsy and, worse, fartsy, to refer to someone with such airs, or a creation of theirs. Art is used in combination with other terms to denote subgenres with serious artistic ambitions (â€Å"art film,† â€Å"art rock†) as well as artistic movements, as in â€Å"art deco,† a truncation of the French phrase art dà ©coratif (â€Å"decorative art†), and art nouveau (â€Å"new art†); the first letter of each word in these phrases is often capitalized, especially when associated with other initial-capped designations. Another movement, named arts and crafts, is usually initial-capped to distinguish it from generic references. The liberal arts are the academic subjects also known as the humanities. The term liberal stems from the idea that knowledge of these subjects and the attendant skills are necessary for free people to know in order to be productive members of society. From the phrase â€Å"liberal arts† comes the designations for mastery of coursework known as the bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees (truncated, alternatively as â€Å"bachelor’s degree,† or bachelor’s, and â€Å"master’s degree,† or master’s). These terms have no specific relation to art itself, though study and/or practice of art may be a component of the coursework. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Misused Words category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:30 Religious Terms You Should KnowRunning Amok or Running Amuck?10 Humorous, Derisive, or Slang Synonyms for â€Å"Leader† or â€Å"Official†