Nardelli’s Nemesis
January 4, 2007
As it happens, I was shopping at Home Depot last night only hours after that company’s arrogant CEO Bob Nardelli had been handed an unseemly $210 million exit package. It all seemed so right, that he had been booted:
I was hoping to replace the plastic drawer runners on a bathroom cabinet I had bought at one of Nardelli’s stores just four years ago. The mere weight of the drawer and its contents had caused the support mechanism to collapse. Understand, this drawer is rarely opened and shut. It holds shampoo and other like items in a rarely used guest bathroom in a rarely visited weekend cabin. No abuse. The drawer, in effect, rotted and fell apart. The runners simply were not strong enough to hold up under even less-than-normal use.
OK. That’s bad enough. But now I’m looking for replacement parts at the same store where I bought the cabinet, and you guessed it: nothing in stock. The attendant was helpful. But all he could offer was hardware that approximates the correct pieces. “You can always return them if they don’t work,” he tells me. That, of course, misses on two points: There is no way I’m going through the return process (much less the long drive and parking hassle) to bring back a $4 item. If I buy it and it doesn’t fit, Home Depot keeps the proceeds from a bogus sale. Bigger yet: do I want to spend a couple hours installing this new hardware only to find out in the end that it’s a bad fit? No way! The attendant tells me to try my local hardware store.
So I walked away from Home Depot empty handed. Nardelli, unfortunately, did not. His exit package was disgracefully large for a man who reigned over a lagging stock price for years while Lowe’s ate his lunch. Will Home Depot repair itself without Nardelli? Maybe. There’s something to be said for investing in a company whose stock seemingly can’t perform any worse. But I wouldn’t make the bet just now. First, I’d want to see the company actually sell me something I need, which seems increasingly unlikely as its staff has advised me to shop my neighborhood hardware store.
