Welcome to Home Home Depot
HomeHomeDepot is a free resource for home and home depot information world wide. Home and Home Depot updates information related to various news and articles. Home Home Deopt also offers comprehensive web directory for home related category listings.
Home Depot Article
|
Home Depot closings deal glancing blow to Bertch
The recent announcement Atlanta-based Home Depot will close its Expo business along with its Yardbirds, Design Center and HD Bath stores came as a blow to Waterloo-based Bertch Cabinet Manufacturing Co., but it was somewhat muted, said Gary Bertch, the company's owner. "We had been just working with that home services division that they purchased a little over a year ago," Bertch said. "Unfortunately, with them closing that up, it's kind of up in the air at this point." In late January, Atlanta-based Home Depot announced it was cutting 7,000 jobs and closing the home-improvement offshoot businesses. The company said that, over the next two months, it will close 34 Expo stores, five Yardbirds stores, two Design Center stores and seven locations of a bath-remodeling business known as HD Bath. The closings will affect about 5,000 employees in the stores and 2,000 jobs in Home Depot's support departments and distribution centers. Home Depot said its Expo high-end design and decor business had not performed well, even during the housing boom, and has suffered further during the current housing downturn. Bertch has been a supplier to the home-improvement stores. "Anything associated with home-building industry is down significantly," Bertch said. "There are spotty markets that are holding up better than others on a national level, but it's affected all of us associated with that industry. We're just trying to get ourselves into the situation where we'll be one of the survivors." Bertch said his company's strategy has worked for the most part. "We've had to cut hours back. We've been trying to rotate some voluntary layoffs, taking measures we need to in order to hold onto some good people and doing what we can to hang on," he said. The company, meanwhile, has been busy trying to develop new products. "It's a tough market," Bertch said. In spite of the Home Depot setback, Bertch has not had to undergo any unusual downsizing of its work force. "We've been kind of adjusting over the last three years as things have slowed down, so there haven't been any major layoffs at any one time --- just through attrition," Bertch said. "And we've had 10-20 people at a time laid off over the last three years. We're trying to hold there right now. We're right around that thousand mark, and hopefully won't have to go down any more." Bertch Cabinet Manufacturing was founded in 1977. "A spokeswoman for Jasper, Ind.-based MasterBrand Cabinets, of which Waterloo's other major cabinet manufacturer, Omega Cabinetry, is a division, declined to comment on the Home Depot downsizing's effect on that company. MasterBrand is a subsidiary of Lincolnshire, Ill.-based Fortune Brands Inc., which bought Omega in 2002. Contact Jim Offner at (319) 291-1598 or jim.offner@wcfcourier.com. http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2009/02/16/business/local/11014908.txt |
|