Home Depot 1999 Annual Report Download - page 8

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During fiscal 1999, The Home Depot was recognized for its
industry and stock market leadership by being added to the
Dow Jones Industrial Average.
are confident in our ability to continue the consistent
sales and earnings growth our stockholders have
come to expect.
Providing Total Solutions
We reached further into our industry to find new ways
to serve customers.
Our commitment to new and existing customers
has expanded inside and outside the walls of
Home Depot stores. As the North American home-
ownership base has grown and become more
diverse, so have our customers’ needs. Plain vanilla
is not enough – our customers want what they want,
when they want it and where they want it.
In response, we added new products and services
to our stores during the year. For example, we intro-
duced a broad assortment of major appliances at
nearly 150 Home Depot stores. Appliances are a
natural extension of the products and services we
currently offer. They also provide us with another
opportunity to extend the trusting relationship we
have with our customers. We expect to offer appli-
ances in all remaining U.S. Home Depot stores
during fiscal 2000.
We expanded our line of proprietary brands
to include highly recognized names, such as
General Electric®and Thomasville®
. During
fiscal 1999, we completed the introduction of
GE SmartWater™water heaters into all our stores. We
also reached agreements to begin selling a new line
of kitchen cabinets under the Thomasville name
beginning in fiscal 2000. These new product lines
are excellent examples of our merchants’ creativity
in developing proprietary brands that provide our
customers with more choices of quality products at
value prices – available only at The Home Depot.
Nearly 50,000 customers sharpened their do-it-
yourself skills at Home Depot UniversitySM, a four-week
customer education program that premiered in all
our stores during fiscal 1999. In addition, we added
tool rental centers to 104 stores during the year,
bringing the total to 150. We also further refined
our test of new services for professional customers
in three markets, and we added this package of
services to ten additional markets.
Behind the scenes, we worked to enhance the
customer service experience in our stores. We
implemented new systems, tested new store for-
mats and tweaked our staffing models, all with the
mission to make our stores easier to shop and our
associates more accessible to customers. We firmly
believe that there is always room for improvement.