DOES HOME DEPOT DELIVER PRO

DOES HOME DEPOT DELIVER PRO

Home Depot’s focus on the pro contractors is attuned to the growth of the housing and improvement market, said Ken Leon, research director for industry and equities at CFRA Research. Home Depot's Stonecrest warehouse has a train track where rail cars arrive loaded with material, which requires skilled labor for unloading. About 40% of the items in the center come in by rail, general manager Rob Albert said. The rail was long enough to park seven boxcars, each of which would arrive holding as much as four or five flat-bed trucks. At the other end, a rail spur stood empty, awaiting a shipment. Some of the 25 truck bays around the building were open, the scent of a spring rain drifting inside.Īt one end of the 1,086 foot-long building workers on break could shoot baskets. Not far away, a Home Depot worker counted items to be loaded on a truck.įorklifts scurried along, yellow flights flashing, blue lights glowing, horns honking frequently in warnings to each other. Which is the answer to Shariff’s mystery: the materials arriving at the Poncey-Highland townhome project come from Stonecrest.Īt the flat-bed center on a recent Monday morning, an 18-wheeler parked in the main aisle looked small between the racks of roofing, mulch and drywall reaching up toward the 40-foot ceiling. With 46 trucks - some making more than one sortie a day - the Stonecrest center supplies deliveries in a roughly 200-mile radius. So far, eight “flat-bed centers” are open, including the facility in Stonecrest, which has nearly 900,000 square feet of space, counting an outdoor storage area. The massive new Home Depot warehouse in Stonecrest has more than two hundred employees distributed in three-shifts that work twenty hours a day. General warehouse associate Chad Witcher checks the order of the material he is taking to a flatbed truck for distribution. “They think of us as a convenience store, like a 7-11.” “This is not item selling, this is project selling,” Padilla said. Instead, Home Depot uses the pro centers to stock large quantities of the big items that a builder needs, but also the smaller things that naturally go with the order: For an order of doors, for example, throw in hinges and locks. The idea is to avoid having to pull together a large order from various Home Depot stores, which might mean giving the customer less than what he ordered or delivering it piecemeal. Large enough for flat-bed trucks to drive through for loading and unloading, the buildings are central hubs that combine a range of items needed by a pro into a single delivery. And that’s where the national network of distribution centers comes in. “Obviously the housing market is still very strong.” “Our pros are telling us that their backlog is full,” he said. The Vinings-based company may be the world’s largest home improvement retailer, but it isn’t close to cornering that burgeoning market, said Hector Padilla, a Home Depot executive vice president. Home improvement was already big business in the United States, and the pandemic fueled a renewed and continuing wave of demand from both do-it-yourselfers and pros. “It just shows up in the truck, that’s the beauty of it,” Shariff said.įor Home Depot, the beauty might be somewhat different, like finding better ways to handle what is now half of its $150 billion-a-year business, the orders from contractors and developers - the professionals. Where the materials come from is a mystery, but also irrelevant. So Pacific Point calls its account rep at the company, talks through its construction needs and puts in an order. This new network is part of Home Depot’s answer to get product to its customers, and outfox competitors, like archrival Lowe’s, that is sharpening its own strategy.Īnd people like Shariff are not simply walk-into- Home-Depot-for-a-hammer-and-nails kind of customers. The crunch has sometimes led to delays for renovations and construction of homes. The homebuilding and remodeling industry has been disrupted by supply chain shocks amid a ramp-up in housing demand.

Regardless of the weather, the warehouse does not stop working, with three shifts a day, operations are carried out by more than two hundred workers.

Does home depot deliver