Even though Bob Nardelli wasn't great, he instituted something that makes a LOT of sense.
In the Bernie and Arthur era of The Home Depot, the staff spent an hour stocking shelves then they sent everyone home and locked the doors. A massive percentage of what The Home Depot sells has to be moved with a forklift, and it's really hard to run one on the sales floor with customers around. Nardelli decided to hire night stocking crews and keep people in the building around the clock. They can operate pretty much unfettered because there aren't customers in the building at the time.
Then again...Nardelli also instituted a Six Sigma system at The Home Depot, which makes no fucking sense in a retail environment. Six Sigma works in a manufacturing environment - if you're making cars you can standardize the process used to do the work because every car needs an engine, it needs four tires, it needs doors, that sort of thing. And since the process of putting an engine in Car 1252 is the same as putting one in Car 2535, your process control steps will always work. At a retail establishment, you don't know whether a customer is coming in for ten Simpson H1 hurricane ties or four pallets of steer manure - and because the sales techniques for selling the first product are far different from the second...you might have to spend ten minutes explaining the differences between H1, H2 and H4 ties and evaluating the person's project to decide if that's the best one for them (yes, I was in the hurricane tie department), but the person wanting the other product may very well walk up to a cash register and tell the person, "please put four skids of manure on that trailer right over there." I mean, shit is shit - and since you only have one kind of shit to sell to someone you don't have to sell someone on the features and benefits of fifty pounds of shit in a fifty-pound bag.
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