Home Depot – “It's been good so far.”

Pros

Challenging work, excellent pay for the field, good benefits and excellent possibility for advancement if you want to be a Store Manager for the rest of your life.
Home Depot will always give back what you put in.

Cons

The Home Depot like any retail environment is extremely stressful and disorganized. Lack of technology and an aged infrastructure and logistics system makes it near impossible to provide the level of customer service the company demands. Long uncompensated hours as a salaried manager, "fire drills" when higher ups could possibly be in the area are always affecting our execution and performance and keeping stress levels high when they do not need to be.
Also trying to move from the store into corporate or field staff is next to impossible, the company seems to rather hire from the outside than staff its ranks with knowledgeable associates who have grown up with the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Please work faster on updating our logistics, supply chain, and technology overall. Being in stock is a requirement of the company but we should not have to spend our days driving from store to store to transfer in product because we cannot get it. Also,negotiating stronger control over our service providers (such as installers and delivery agents) would greatly increase customer satisfaction because right now when they screw up all we can do is stand there and tell the customer "I'm sorry" and then refund them money to try to make them happy.