The Early Years of Home Depot...

I worked for Home Depot for many years when it was still a "young" company - only 10 years old with stores located only in a handful of states across the country.

ETHICAL STANDARD #2, Disclosure of Consideration or Compensation Received, resonated with me most and brought me back to those early days at Home Depot. I was a starving student, just 18 yrs old, working in the Paint Department at a Home Depot store located only a few miles away from the Headquarters of The BEHR Paint Company in Santa Ana, California. My fellow co-workers and I were were spoiled by their Manufacturer Reps who were HOT for us to sell their products. At the time, Home Depot was strict about their dress code of wearing collared polo shirts to work. Home Depot's mascot, a cartoon Do-it-Yourself character named HOMER, was all the rage amongst employees who claimed to "bleed orange". The BEHR company supplied the paint department employees with custom polo shirts with the BEHR logo on front and a picture of Homer using and promoting the BEHR products on back. I must have had 7 different ones... and they were cool! The elaborate luncheons put on by the BEHR reps were enticing, too. At the time, I had plenty of positive things to say about the products sold by a company who was putting clothes on my back and putting food in my stomach! The marketing and sales training of employees about BEHR products far exceeded those of other paint manufacturers. The presence of their reps in the stores was the most frequent of any other vendor I'd seen, too. Not that it's a bad thing! They were very attentive as a company. They had the customer service thing DOWN!

I ended up transferring stores to a location back east and discovered that even 3,000 miles away from the BEHR plant, the reps were pressing just as hard for sales - and rewarding those employees who made the sales - with even more elaborate perks. Other vendors had caught on by then and the "purchasing" of store employees had gotten so out of control and competitive among the big suppliers that The Home Depot had to step in and prohibit such activities. I believe a story had been made public, too, and Home Depot had to do some damage control.

ETHICAL STANDARD #2 of the WOMMA Code of Ethics is about DISCLOSURE OF COMPENSATION - which is ultimately all about HONESTY. Essentially, without disclosing that I was compensated in some way by the BEHR company to EACH AND EVERY customer I recommended the BEHR products to was dishonest. I was just out of high school and didn't know squat about paint (except for what they told me) - nor did I really care at that age. It doesn't matter that I honestly, to this day, STILL believe in the premier quality of BEHR paint... and it's still the only paint I will use for MY OWN projects. It doesn't matter. It was still a form of bribery. The BEHR company was "Engaging in marketing practices where the marketer provided goods to the communicator as consideration for recommendations".