The Home Depot
New York City
 

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Accent and bath rugs.

Beyond the rugs, there is broadloom carpeting, hardwood flooring and ceramic floor and decorative tiles. Flooring of all types covers about 6,000 square feet of the Home Depot store.

The rug department at  Home Depot Manhattan is a mix of brilliance and stupidity

Let's start with the stuff that's absolutely  brilliant.

• Lighting. The primary purpose of store lighting is the illumination of  merchandise. At Depot's new store, the  combined incandescent and fluorescent lighting does that job admirably without calling attention to itself.  It has none of the pretentious theatricality we see so often in department stores. The result is an evenly suffused light that looks downright natural. I kept looking up to the ceiling to see if there were skylights up there. There are no dead areas and no annoying bright-white spotlights.
   

• Vertical Selection. Every type of rug imaginable is found in one area. When will other stores learn that consumers don't give a dang that one buyer is in charge of room size rugs and another buyer handles small rugs? That doesn't mean they have to be carried at different ends of the store. Why not give consumers an opportunity to shop for expensive and inexpensive rugs simultaneously? A cross-over large rug/small rug purchase is possible. Perhaps TWO purchases may occur.  Maybe there will even be an impulse purchase.

That's the brilliant stuff.

Merchandising

I'm not too sure that  displaying those $8,000 rugs at the front of the department is brilliantly risky or riskily stupid.

Maybe  no one even thought about it, so it could be just plain dumb.

There are precedents.

That kind of knock-em-dead merchandising has been used successfully  by Off Fifth, the Saks Fifth Ave. outlet chain. Consumers are presented with the most expensive merchandise at the front door and things gets progressively less pricey as you work yourself through the store.

Whether this philosophy works at Manhattan Depot is still to be determined.

We asked Jerry Weinrib, chairman of ABC Carpet & Home, what he thought about Depot selling high priced hand knotted rugs. "They're showing them, but are they selling them?" he replied. "At ABC, we sell them."

At the more --ahem -- popular price points, Depot has other problems. Lined against the back wall were $69  4x6  mystery rugs  rolled inside out  and hermetically sealed in plastic. What the face side of the rug looked like was anyone's guess. Perhaps a vendor could have printed a label showing the rug in a room setting? Naaaah.

Pricing

Home Depot stack and rack merchandising  has a way of making people think the chain has the low-low price on everything. That's brilliant.

In reality, prices are about average. Certainly one of a kind rugs in the $3,000 to $8,000 range for 9x12 are  what you would find in your friendly neighborhood service-oriented Oriental rug store. Hand tufted rugs for $349 to $700 are about par for the course, as well.

Kathy Ireland rugs from Shaw Living had retail prices of $329 in  the 5"5" x 7'11" size. (These Kathy Ireland designs are exclusive to Depot, by the way). Similarly, Oriental Weavers woven rugs were in the $279 to $399 range. Accent rugs were about $13 to $25 in 2' x 4' size. That's all within the range of manufacturers' suggested retail prices.

Same Ol' Depot Service

They can build the most beautiful store in the world, and fill it with classy merchandise, but unless  Home Depot does something about it's salesmanship, the retailer will never be better than mediocre.

When it comes to sales service, the Manhattan Home Depot is just like very other store in the system: Dreadful. (But at least the Depot kids smile. At Expo, they give  no service and they're uppity).

In the hand knot area, I heard one customer ask her friend, "Why are these rugs so expensive?  Is it the workmanship?€VbCrLf

Since the only sales person on the floor was selling a scatter rug in the back of the department, I guess she'll never find out.

Back there with the salesman, the customer was making a choice between two small rugs. One was a machine tufted scatter with a rubberized back for $20. The other was a small crewel  import for $35 without backing. The customer seemed to be giving himself a little sales talk while the salesman kept his mouth shut. The customer said he liked the looks of the crewel work rug, but needed the non-skid component. The salesman shrugged. Three feet away, there was a display of non-skid underlay.

The man took the $20 rug and went away.

The salesman went away, too.

The two women at the hand-knotted rack also went away.

I went away.