Home Depot is known in the retail business as a “category killer.” A form of retail plague, companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s kill off the weak, and makes everyone else in the business sick. In Sequim, Washington, Home Depot celebrated its first year in business, while five days earlier, Rookard’s Do It Best closed is doors after 20 years in business. A third home improvement business, Thomas Building Center, posted a sign outside its building that read: “Happy 1st anniversary Home Depot. We will truly miss Rookards Do It Best.” Willy Rookard told the Peninsula Daily News that his 7,000 s.f. business never recovered from the initial Home Depot hit. The Home Depot is nineteen times bigger than Rookard’s. According to Rookard’s, once Home Depot opened, the smaller store lost about 125 customers a day. The owners finally decided to liquidate the business. “People wanted us to hang on longer,” Rookard told the newspaper. “We figured there was no sense beating a dead horse.” When Rookard’s went out of business, Thomas Building Center put up their message to remind the good people of Sequim that they had `Lost a good competitor. ‘ Owner Rand Thomas said Home Depot “was the nail in the coffin.”
Actually, it was not Home Depot that killed Rookard’s. It was Home Depot shoppers that killed Rookard’s. No one forced those shoppers to abandon Rookard’s. They did so because Home Depot was bigger, had more products, had cheaper prices, and was the glitzy “next new toy.” Home Depot shoppers have a sense of community that is no bigger than the dimensions of their own shopping cart. They don’t care that Home Depot sources its products from sweatshop labor, that it gives to politically right-wing candidates, that it exploits its workers, that is has induced the exodus of American manufacturing jobs in the tool industry. Nothing will stand in the way of their cheap, Korean hammer, that they will use to break the backbone of the middle class merchant in their hometown. It was shoppers who killed Rookard’s, not Home Depot.
