Home Depot Clinics – a great idea executed poorly

Home Depot runs special workshops on a variety of home renovation topics. They’ve simplified the scheduling by setting up a national roster of clinics that run at every store at the same time every week. So, every Thursday at 7 in Feb would be a flooring installation seminar.

From a roll-out point of view, it’s brilliant. No registration, just show up – at any store, wherever is convenient for you.

We tried it yesterday.

No dice. The store we went to decided not to run the clinic. Despite the local advertising circular and the website encouraging customers to come into that store at that time “We do one on Saturday” was the message we got.

It’s really great and all for the corporation to set up a program, but if the local stores can’t act on it, it’s worthless.

It was a pretty big waste of time to hustle over to Home Depot midweek, on their schedule. I’m not sure I’m willing to try again; my trust for the organization to actually deliver on the class is zero.

Very disappointing; the potential is great, the execution is crappy.

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