Home Depot

ATLANTA -- The Home Depot Inc., known for breakneck growth during much of its history, is shelving wide-eyed projections to focus instead on a major fix-up job within its retail business. The Atlanta home improvement giant unveiled a back-to-basics plan yesterday that braced investors for a slim year as new chief executive Francis S. Blake tries to get the Home Depot house in order. Sales will grow 2 percent at most this year, boosted mainly by a wholesale supply business that caters to industrial customers, Home Depot said.

For six years, it was a perk Home Depot's chief executive, Robert L. Nardelli, could not do without: a catered lunch for his top deputies, served daily on the 22nd floor of the company's headquarters in Atlanta. But several days into his tenure as Nardelli's successor, Francis S. Blake quietly abolished the free meal, telling senior executives to take the elevator down to the first floor and, on their own dime, eat with the company's rank and file in the cafeteria, according to an employee.

Jeff Stone is courting an entirely new crowd of well-heeled customers these days. All sales should be this easy.Stone, the president of Tweeter Home Entertainment Group of Canton, Mass., knows all about pitching customers on high-end consumer electronics.Now Tweeter itself is a darling to institutional investors with huge sums to invest and a powerful appetite for retail stocks. Their interest has helped Tweeter stock to more than triple in five months. Mutual fund managers and other big investors began buying retail stocks in volume two years ago, starting with large, well-known names such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Dayton Hudson Corp.

Hechinger Co.'s announcement that it will close its remaining stores begs a basic question: who's going to occupy all that space left behind by one of the Baltimore area's oldest and most entrenched retail chains?It's a question that is likely to intrigue the commercial real estate community for some time to come.Susan B. Anderson, vice president of H & R Retail Inc. in Timonium, called the liquidation and dispersion of the Hechinger properties "a big deal."She said the sheer diversity of the chain's holdings makes it impossible to generalize about what will become of the properties.

Mere months ago, Internet retailing was dominated by companies that had never sold a product in a store, with the Amazon.coms of the world grabbing headlines and Wall Street's attention.But now, the virtual retailers are bracing for an onslaught from the "bricks-and-mortar" chains, which have been galvanized into action by last year's phenomenally successful holiday season that racked up $3 billion in online sales."Once consumers started shopping online, they stayed shopping online," said Seema Williams, an analyst with the consumer e-commerce group for Forrester Research Inc. "That was the wake-up call."

Eighteen months after its takeover by a California buyout firm, Hechinger Co. said yesterday that it has changed its top executive and shored up financing in an effort to rebuild its struggling operation.Hoping to stem heavy losses and win back customers, the Largo-based home- improvement retailer has secured $700 million in credit from BankBoston Retail Finance Inc.The credit line will give the company additional flexibility, said spokeswoman Lauri A. Rice.Hechinger operates 206 Hechinger, Home Quarters and Builders Square stores in 28 states and Washington, D.C., not including the 34 stores that it said last month it intends to close by July.

Caldor Corp., the latest casualty of a retail war being won by mass discounters, said yesterday it will shut down for good this spring, closing 145 stores -- including eight in the Baltimore area -- and laying off its 20,000 employees.The Norwalk, Conn.-based retailer, with discount stores throughout the Northeast, has operated under bankruptcy court protection since 1995. The company announced Jan. 9 that it had stopped ordering or taking delivery of new stock from suppliers.The $2.5 billion company had attempted to return to profitability by cutting costs and closing stores -- including one at Cranberry Mall in Westminster and another at Golden Ring Mall in Rosedale last year -- but said it fell short of its goals.

Once one of the premier home-improvement chains in the country, Hechinger Co. collapsed under the weight of oppressive competition yesterday, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announcing it will close 89 stores -- four in Maryland.In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, the company listed assets of $1.3 billion and liabilities of $1.4 billion. The chain has suffered heavy losses as its larger competitors have seized control of the booming home-improvement market.

With the opening of its first metropolitan Baltimore superstore today, home improvement giant Lowe's Cos. Inc. is expecting to win over shoppers from rival retailers by stressing service and a user-friendly layout.The nation's second-largest home improvement retailer has chosen White Marsh to launch its aggressive expansion in this area, which will include superstores in Glen Burnie next month and in Timonium and Westminster later this year. The Westminster store will replace a 6-year-old Lowe's of about half the size, now the only one in the area.

It all started with antiques. David Wiesand, trained as a painter, opened a shop on Howard Street some time ago, selling furniture and decorative accessories. "It was antiques and a few small pieces that I designed," Wiesand says. After a dozen years, Wiesand's own wood and iron furniture, accessories and lighting crowded out the antiques. "It was just a few antiques," he says.Now he has opened a new shop and workshop, called McLain Wiesand, in the old Reliable Tire buildings at 1013 Cathedral St. He's renovated the space -- including the original tin ceiling.

Just add water. That's all that was left for the residents of the East Baltimore neighborhood of Oliver to do after a vegetable garden and urban sanctuary were installed in a single day in a vacant lot in the 1300 block of N. Central Ave. Eight raised beds were filled with clean soil and planted with 150 vegetable seedlings Thursday. Around the perimeter, 400 perennials, herbs and shrubs were planted, plus 30 trees to shield the oasis from traffic noise. All planted in time for Mayor Sheila Dixon to cut the ribbon at the end of the day. "The vegetables that come out of this garden," said the mayor, "will help others make the change to greener and healthier living."

The Big Glen Burnie Carnival, an annual extravaganza of rides, games and fair food, has gone green. Organizers of the carnival teamed with the office of Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold and a local Home Depot to introduce recycling to the event for the first time in its 102-year history. Beth Behegan, a member of the executive committee of the Glen Burnie Improvement Association, which puts on the carnival as its chief fundraiser, said it decided this year to switch from fountain sodas to plastic bottles.

There are two types of people in this world: those who will drive home from the Home Depot with a big hunk of trim sticking out of their car window and those who will say "I told you so" afterward. Oftentimes, these people are married. If you are a regular reader, you are probably accurately predicting which adult in Janet's World was the proponent of driving a 10-foot car with a 12-foot piece of molding sticking out the passenger window. And to you I say, "Thank you, regular reader. Your faithfulness is rewarded with your correctness."

More than 500 Baltimore-area workers will be out of work during the next two months as the unemployment rate in the state continues to climb amid the recession. Mail services provider Pitney Bowes is closing its mail presorting facility in Baltimore by the end of the month, resulting in 70 employees losing their jobs, the company said Wednesday. The move is intended to help streamline operations in the Eastern region, Pitney Bowes said in a statement. "Pitney Bowes informed affected employees in mid-March and is working closely with them to provide support by making them aware of potential alternative internal job opportunities at other locations," the company said in a statement, noting it is offering workers severance.

A 26-year-old Howard County native was shot and killed in an apparent murder-suicide in South Florida over the weekend, police said. Matthew Lennon, a 2000 graduate of Centennial High School who had moved to Florida two years ago, was shot once in the chest by a man who believed Lennon had assaulted a mutual friend, according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office. The incident occurred about 12:30 a.m. Saturday. Police said Lennon and friend Jack Benrube stopped by an apartment in Dania Beach after spending the evening watching college basketball at a bar. During the visit, Benrube suffered an asthma attack and was crawling across the floor to get to a balcony for some air, police said.

THE PROBLEM: Lights at a Northwest Baltimore shopping plaza have been dark for months. THE BACKSTORY : Watchdog readers often draw attention to unlit street lamps in their neighborhoods. But Shirley Clinton had an unusual problem because her immediate environs include the shopping center across the street from her apartment complex. Clinton is president of the tenants association at the Reisterstown Square Apartments on Eberle Drive. The entrance to the apartment complex faces a Home Depot in Reisterstown Plaza.

On a freezing Saturday morning, with snow flurries in the forecast, a handful of people braved the weather to watch Stephanie Kirchner give a clinic on tiling at the Home Depot in Cockeysville. At a small demonstration area in the middle of the store, surrounded by buckets and wet saws and mixing compounds, Kirchner ticked off the pros and cons of three types of tile: ceramic, porcelain and natural stone. While natural stone, the priciest of the three, is the Taj Mahal of the tile world, even that has a few negatives, she said.

Use it up - Wear it out - Make it do! It's the credo that your parents or grandparents lived by. Posters from the World War II era screamed it at careless consumers and those without money to consume. Now, as more Americans have been swept into what some have dubbed the nation's "Great Recession" - and many more worry that it is only a matter of time - this mantra of frugality is once again becoming a way of life: a call to thrift echoing beyond foreclosed homes and growing unemployment lines.

AirTran Airways parent expects annual loss The parent of discount carrier AirTran Airways expects to post a loss for this fiscal year, its first annual loss since 1999, an executive said yesterday. Chief Financial Officer Arne Haak said that the Orlando, Fla.-based carrier saw a reduction in demand in October as the financial markets declined. AirTran, the second-largest carrier at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, has been adding new fees, cutting costs, selling aircraft and raising fares at times.

CHICAGO - Guitars at Best Buy. Frozen pizzas at Menards. Yoga pants at Walgreen's. As the economy slows and the retail industry cuts back on investment in new-store construction, the time is ripe for dusting off a tried-and-true retail strategy: Sell more products in the stores you have. Sometimes it works. For instance, Barnes & Noble Inc. changed the bookselling business by putting coffee shops in its stores. Other times, it is a strategy that sends merchants far into the weeds. Midwestern shoppers may remember when supermarket chain Jewel sold lumber.