Throwback Thursday is a weekly feature in which we dip into the archives of the Hardlines Weekly Report.
On Dec. 15, 2003, we ran a story with the headline, “Home Depot stakes growth on smaller stores.”
The “smaller” Home Depot on which we were reporting was in the town of Lethbridge, Alta. At 80,000 square feet, the location was smaller than Home Depot’s (then) typical footprint of 105,000 square feet. “It offers a blueprint for Home Depot’s move into smaller markets,” we wrote.
“We’re testing that store size because we can get into so many markets with that size,” said Home Depot Canada’s then-president Annette Verschuren. The store sacrificed some floor space typically devoted to LBM, but aside from that, it looked like a typical Home Depot big box. “When you walk it, you can’t tell the difference,” Verschuren said.
