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When The Home Depot was founded in 1978, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank had no idea how revolutionary this new “hardware store” would be for home improvement and the retail industry.
Today, we’re proud to be the world’s largest home improvement retailer. In more than 2,300 stores across North America, we aspire to excel in service – to our customers, associates, communities and shareholders. That’s what leadership means to us. That's The Home Depot difference.
Our founders' vision of one-stop shopping for the do-it-yourselfer came to fruition when they opened the first two Home Depot stores on June 22, 1979, in Atlanta, Georgia. The first stores, at around 60,000 square feet each, were cavernous warehouses that dwarfed the competition and stocked 25,000 products, much more than the average hardware store at that time.
Today, The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer with approximately 475,000 orange-blooded associates and more than 2,300 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The typical store today averages 105,000 square feet of indoor retail space, interconnected with an e-commerce business that offers more than one million products for the DIY customer, professional contractors, and the industry's largest installation business for the Do-It-For-Me customer.
