Word: depot
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RONALD SARGENT: I think there is still lots of opportunity in this business. The top three--Office Depot, OfficeMax and us--only have about 20% of the U.S. market. Still, during the dotcom era, investors thought we were growing too fast, and I think Wall Street wanted to figure out who was going to win in this industry. The question for us was, How does a fast-growth company grow up from adolescence to become a little more of a mature company...
SARGENT: We started with customers and said, "What's important to you?" They told us we weren't terribly differentiated. OfficeMax, Office Depot, Staples--all the same thing, same products, same prices, same service. We heard loud and clear that we had drifted more toward a casual consumer approach rather than our core, which was small business. We heard that our service was just O.K. and that maybe price wasn't as important as it used...
Meanwhile, in the town of Hutto, north of Austin, the construction on State Highway 130 is a sign of things to come. Farmers no longer gather at the cotton gin, but the town's first national chain, Home Depot, has moved in. Mayor Mike Ackerman drives by the construction site every day on his way to work and is sanguine about the changing face of his town. "Anything we can do to get traffic moving north and south, we need to do," he says. The question is whether the rest of Texas agrees with him. --With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin
Shoppers Venturing into the new supersize Sears Grand concept store in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., off the old Route 66, can be forgiven for double-checking the name on the façade. Perhaps it's the barbecue grills on sale outside the entrance, an echo of Home Depot's parking-lot bonanzas, or the reams of DVDs, CDs and books that make you think you've stumbled into Wal-Mart. Maybe it's the colorful signs hanging from the industrial, sky-high ceiling, festooned with cheeky slogans like IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS THAT COUNT, which remind one of the king...
...largest single shareholder through his ESL Investments, has turned Kmart into a cash cow, albeit a shrinking one. Although critics describe his moves as short-term fixes, he reduced inventory, slashed costs, limited discounts and sold off some of Kmart's lucrative real estate to the likes of Home Depot and, yes, even Sears...