Home Depot opened its first stores with empty boxes on the shelves.
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, fired from the Handy Dan chain in 1978, opened two warehouses in Atlanta in June 1979 without the money to fill them. Their merchandiser, Pat Farrah, talked suppliers into sending empty boxes with their labels on, to stack on shelves 20 feet high. “There was air in the boxes,” their financier, Ken Langone, recalled.
Home Depot on Brandseum