John Harrington - IR Business Editor - 12/25/05

Home store wars

Regular readers heard it here three months ago, but do-it-yourself retailer Lowe's made it official with a press release this week -- the home improvement giant is coming to Helena.

The new location is not only across the street from Power Townsend, Helena's venerable, century-old hardware and home improvement store, but just down the road from Home Depot, the country's other home improvement warehouse giant, which opened here two years ago.

The arrival of Lowe's, in close proximity to its biggest orange-clad competitor, has people abuzz with a widespread story about the two national stores and their long-running battle against each other.

The storyline usually goes something like this: After a bitter divorce, the wife of the Home Depot founder took all the trade secrets she knew and started Lowe's just to make life miserable for her ex-husband. Every time a Home Depot opens, the story goes, a Lowe's is not far behind, hoping to steal customers and market share.

It's an interesting story, one that probably has its roots in the fact that the stores do seem to leapfrog each other across the country and land in close proximity to each other. But it's not true.

According to www.snopes.com, a Web site devoted to debunking or verifying urban myths of all kinds, there's nothing to the Lowe's/Home Depot divorce tale. Lowe's, the site says, was founded in 1946 in North Wilkesboro, N.C. The co-founder died in 1961, the year the company went public.

Home Depot was founded in 1978, 42 years after Lowe's, in Atlanta, by a pair of executives who had recently been fired from a home improvement chain in California, along with a New York investment banker. The company went public in 1981. One of the founders, Arthur Blanks, today owns football's Atlanta Falcons.

And as long as we're perusing snopes.com, here's the lowdown on some other rumors: the flush toilet was not invented by Thomas Crapper; the Baby Ruth candy bar was not named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter; and I hate to break it to you, but that e-mail that's made the rounds for years containing the famous, top-secret cookie recipe from the department store Nieman Marcus? Not true either. (In fact, the store acknowledges the rumor on its Web site and offers up a chocolate chip cookie recipe -- for free.)

At any rate, Lowe's will begin construction in the spring and plans to open in the third quarter of 2006. The company claims a store of this size -- 116,000 square feet, with a 31,000 square-foot garden center, represents an investment of $18.5 million, and the store expects to employ some 175 people when it opens.

When it's done, we'll have more than 300,000 square feet of home improvement space to shop at within eyesight of the planned Custer Avenue interchange.

E-mail your Open for Business ideas to helenair.com">john.harrington@helenair.com.