The Blacklist: Home Depot

I’ve decided to start my own personal investment blacklist. These are companies I refuse to frequent or invest in because of personal experiences I have had with them. I’m sticking to personal experiences because I’d like to keep the message of this site primarily positive and stay focused on hunting out companies that are doing things right. However, when I witness corporate wrong-doing first-hand, I will announce my divestiture here. As you can guess from the title, the first entry on my list is Home Depot.

How did Home Depot End Up on My Investment Blacklist?

As I mentioned, I have not made it my mission to actively ferret our corporate wrong-doing, so I can’t comment on Home Depot’s environmental record as a whole. But often a single action can reveal a company’s overall attitude toward the environment, its customers, and humanity in general.

This afternoon I was shopping at my local Home Depot’s garden section, mainly because it was late afternoon and it was the only nursery in town that was still open. I discovered on a pallet in the back a collection of dried up or wilted plants. One of them was actually a very nice flowering quince, which I could use for my garden. The leaves and fruit were all dried out and dead, but the stems were still green, and the plant was perfectly viable.

A Policy of Deliberate Waste

I asked the floor worker what the deal was with the plants, and she said they were “marked down,” which meant that they would be receiving a refund for them from the grower. “so the grower takes them back, then?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “we just throw them in the dumpster.”

“I see. Well let me just take this one off your hands, then.” I replied.

“We’re not allowed to do that, sir.”

As it turns out, the corporation does not even allow them to sell the plants at a discount. It’s their policy to require that they be tossed into the dumpster. They insist on wasting perfectly viable plants, the plastic pots they come in, the wooden pallets they are shipped on, the energy required to ship them, the landfill space to take them, and all the energy and water required to grow them in the first place. This is despite the fact that disposing of them actually costs the company money, and frankly I’d be doing them a favor by taking some of them off their hands. However, the floor-worker said she’d be fired if she allowed me to take one of the dumpster-bound plants.

Using Rent-A-Cops to Help Ensure that Nothing is Salvaged

Naturally after this conversation I wondered if there were a bunch of viable plants in the Home Depot dumpster that I could use to help get my garden going. So I drove around behind the store to have a look. There I discovered that the dumpster was locked up in chains. To add insult to injury, a morbidly obese security guard came up and hassled me for being there as well, even though this was in a public strip-mall, the company does not own the property, and there were no signs posted against trespassing.

The security guard, wheezing from her 30-yard walk, attempted to interrogate me about what I was up to. When I told her I was a lawyer, was well aware of my rights, had every right to be there, and was under no obligation to tell her anything at all, she mentioned something about monitoring me on a security camera and waddled away.

Malfeasance vs. Nonfeasance

It’s a standard policy in American law that malfeasance, or active wrong-doing, is worse than nonfeasance, or the simple failure to do what’s right. This makes intuitive sense to most people - failing to save a drowning man when you are able is bad, but not as bad as holding his head down.

Much of the staggering amount of waste and environmental damage generated by corporations every year can be attributed to nonfeasance. Apathy, sloth, cost-cutting measures, etc. As bad as that is, however, active malfeasance like the deliberate waste created by this policy of Home Depot’s is much worse. Apparently it was so important to the company that these plants end up in the dumpster, rather than my garden, that they were prepared to lose money in order to make it happen. I left the premises, disgusted, never to return, and sold all of my shares in Home Depot the following morning.

A Danger to Shareholders

Any company that is actually willing to lose money in order to maintain such a senseless policy is not only an environmental liability, it’s also a questionable investment. It’s true that Home Depot has excellent standing in the markets at present, but the tide is turning on these types of policies. The market is starting to wake up to the need for more responsible business practices, and consumers are at last beginning to factor them into their shopping decisions. If the trend continues (and let’s all hope and pray that it does), shareholders of more short-sighted companies had best keep a close eye on them, or they may be in for a nasty surprise down the line.

Welcome to the blacklist, Home Depot. In one petty action, you have lost my substantial business, my investment capital, and my respect.