By Guy Page
The lastest short video by Hank ‘Planet Hank’ Poytras (above) briefly tells the story of jobs and tax revenue lost to New Hampshire when the Brattleboro Home Depot closed in 2008, sending much of the store’s business to a nearby Home Depot in New Hampshire.
Here’s some more background into why the store closed.
The Home Depot’s 2008 decision to close its Brattleboro store just four years after opening marked not only the loss of 83 jobs, but also an ironic ending to one of Vermont’s most contentious big-box development fights.
According to a 2008 news report in the Times Argus, the Atlanta-based home improvement retailer announced it would close the 60,800-square-foot Brattleboro store as part of a nationwide restructuring that shuttered 15 underperforming locations. Company spokeswoman Jean Niemi said the decision was driven by the store’s financial performance amid a slowing economy and sluggish housing market.
“We had taken a look at the financials at a number of our stores and came up with a number that didn’t meet the targeted returns, and unfortunately Brattleboro was one of them,” Niemi said.
Niemi said the Brattleboro location employed 83 workers, who would receive severance packages. She emphasized that the company’s other Vermont stores in Williston, Rutland and Bennington were meeting financial expectations.
Although Brattleboro sits just across the Connecticut River from Home Depot’s Keene, New Hampshire, store and within driving distance of another location in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Niemi said competition from nearby stores was not a factor in the closure decision.
Instead, she noted the Brattleboro store was significantly smaller than a typical Home Depot. At 60,800 square feet, it was roughly 40% smaller than the company’s standard 100,000-square-foot format.
The company spokesperson did not address the local opposition to which Poytras refers – but as the 2008 ‘Home Depot closing’ story in the Brattleboro Reformer indicates, the big box store’s presence in Brattleboro was indeed hard fought, and its departure celebrated.
When Home Depot announced plans in 2003 to take over the former Ames department store in Brattleboro, residents formed BrattPower to oppose the project and successfully pushed for a big-box store zoning ordinance, the Reformer reported. After the store opened, the group shifted from protesting Home Depot to encouraging people to shop at locally owned businesses. Following news of the store’s closure, BrattPower co-founder Tim Stevenson called it a victory for local merchants, saying residents who spend their money at local businesses help strengthen the regional economy and community.
As with nearby Vermont Yankee in Vernon, the ultimate and given reason for closing was economic. However – Windham County will never know whether the local economy would have ultimately benefited from the presence of a low-cost, well-stocked, accessible store hugely popular with contractors and do-it-yourselfers, compared to the local alternatives.