Home Depot WTF?

[Schleprock]

It's all part of business. It costs a company to keep items on the shelf, every month that $100 (pick a number) profit is eroding due to a lot of factors, interest on the purchase, rent, labour...... The accountants will devalue an item to try and get it off the books until it is no longer profitable to sell and they make more money writing it off and taking it as a loss against their taxes. The penalties for taking the tax write off and not destroying the product after are pretty hefty.

That's a pretty basic explanation as to what is going on in a lot of the cases.

 

[byoungblood]

I used to work for an electronics store... returned answering machines and the like that weren't repairable got taken out back and used for batting practice... using an old antenna mast as the bat. Fun stuff.

I worked at Radio Shack back in the late 90s and most defective returns below a certain dollar value we were told do simply "dispose of". How that was done was usually left to our imagination. Quite a few things ended up going home with folks that were savvy enough to fix such things. Stuff nobody was interested in was usually destroyed in a manner like you describe, though we used an actual bat or a small sledgehammer.

More expensive items were either returned to the vendor if it wasn't a Radio Shack brand, or went to the repair center for refurbishment. Refurbished items, along with discontinued items that hadn't sold at normal retail locations would be rounded up and shipped to one of Radio Shacks outlet locations, if they still exist.

 

[kythri]

It's all part of business. It costs a company to keep items on the shelf, every month that $100 (pick a number) profit is eroding due to a lot of factors, interest on the purchase, rent, labour...... The accountants will devalue an item to try and get it off the books until it is no longer profitable to sell and they make more money writing it off and taking it as a loss against their taxes. The penalties for taking the tax write off and not destroying the product after are pretty hefty.

That's a pretty basic explanation as to what is going on in a lot of the cases.

We need to organize an economic/tax reform campaign that removes the ability for vendors/manufacturers to destroy usable or fixable products for a tax credit/deduction.

If they're not going to discount/sell the item themselves, and they want that credit/deduction, they should be donating these items to a charity that can use or resell them.

It's ridiculous that we subsidize such wastefulness.

 

[cheechi]

All returns from Costco get sent to the compactor. A couple years ago I took a load of aluminum to Las Vegas to recycle. Sitting in the yard was about twenty or so pallets of random items. Chainsaws, ladders, bikes, you name it it was there. All scrapped for minor issues. The chainsaw was missing the gas cap. Four or more pallets of ladders were slightly damaged from shipping. Only one stack of ladders were messed up. The rest were perfect. The society we live in is ruled by gimme gimme gimme. Its broke, GO GET A NEW ONE!!! Fixing things is out of the question, or mental range of most people.

Costco is a little different, they basically break even on items after their overhead, they profit mostly on their food (fresh meat/produce etc, the restaurant at the front) and membership fees. gas it has gone both ways for them in the past.

When you're talking about a single store returning half a truckload of ladders, they may not want to pay the shipping or the vendor won't take items back (a lot of the bulk non-grocery items they don't) seasonal stuff is basically all destroyed like you said. If you've been in a costco, you know what i mean by 'the entire middle of the store' is sell it or trash it except for books & clothes.

I won't argue that HD might not have the consignment contracts anymore, but I know of at least 2 Lowe's stores near me that currently do. Sears too, though I think theirs is a little more complex and probably a big sears internal thing.

 

[rodm1]

Very interesting it explains a lot of strange things they do.

 

[Chuck122]

The "throw away" politics are mostly to keep employees honnest. If the items were listed as " to be thrown away" and the manage sold them to you for 5$ a pop, he could have just put the money in his pocket. Therefore homedepot probably has a politic against such transactions