Home Depot on Tuesday announced plans to add 1,000 jobs in three new metro Atlanta distribution centers that will open next year.
The Atlanta-based home improvement giant is adding centers in Locust Grove, Stonecrest and East Point largely to meet a growing demand by its core customers for fast pick-up and delivery, said Stephanie Smith, senior vice president.
Professional contractors and serious do-it-yourselfers are small in number but crucial to the business, she said. “Less than 5% of our customer base is responsible for 45% of our sales. It’s very, very important that we have a strategy for these customers.”
Home Depot has more than 2,200 retail stores, but has been accelerating online efforts in the past few years. Putting distribution centers closer to customers makes it increasingly possible to make deliveries the same day or the next day after an order.
And while the coronavirus spurred huge increases in online ordering, the company’s current approach was in the works long before the pandemic hit, she said.
Three years ago, the company announced plans to make a $1.2 billion investment in its distribution network.
“I don’t think (the pandemic) has changed our strategy very much — we want to go where our customers are telling us to go,” Smith said. “I would say it’s been amplified during COVID.”
The company has six similar supply chain centers already in Georgia.
Home Depot, the largest, Georgia-based company by annual sales with $110 billion last year, has 27,000 employees in the state and more than 400,000 overall, most of them in the United States.
Hiring of 600 workers has already begun at the Locust Grove center, which is set to open early next year. The facility’s main function will be restocking stores in the Southeast.
The two other new centers will deliver directly to customers, Smith said.
The Stonecrest center, set to open next summer, sits near a rail line. It will receive, store and deliver the kinds of materials that come off flat-bed trucks and rail cars, including lumber, concrete and dry wall. It will employ about 100 workers.
The East Point center, planned for opening in late 2021, will be the staging area for deliveries of furniture, appliances and other material. It will employ about 300.
Last week, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that the economy contracted at an annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter — an unprecedented plunge. Slammed by shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, a host of retailers — including icons like Brooks Brothers, J.Crew and Lord & Taylor — have announced plans to file for bankruptcy protection while tens of millions of workers have filed for jobless benefits.
Home Depot is among a minority of retailers seeing a surge of business that is partly due to having so many consumers anxious to buy, but reluctant to enter a store.
Sales at Sandy Springs-based UPS, for example, boomed during the second quarter. Shipments from business to consumer rocketed 65%, officials said. UPS, which has about a half-million workers worldwide, has hired nearly 40,000 more to keep up with orders, the company said.
E-commerce giant Amazon has also been hiring for warehouses and delivery around the state.
