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I like to visit my local Home Depot and Lowe’s stores throughout the holiday season, partly to see if they’ve got any new deals that suit my needs, but also to see what’s selling well and what’s not.
I went to my local Lowe’s on Monday and saw that they have tons of holiday sales inventory sitting around.
Inventory is good, but is there supposed to be this much almost a week into December? Is the holiday shopping season over?
I visited my store at around 5:30pm, and was the only one in the tools gift and promo center.
There were plenty of Kobalt folding saw horses, at their “new lower price” of $29.98.
I also saw plenty of Kobalt 24V cordless power tools, including a new compact chain saw I’ve never seen before.
It’s shocking, how a company with nearly $100 BILLION in annual sales can’t figure out how to send out press releases about new tools anymore. They don’t have a single person saying “hey, look at these new tools we’re selling.”
Wow. Nobody is buying Kobalt hand tools. “Save 40% when you buy 3 or more” and customers are walking buy saying “nah.”
The Dremel display is packed full with rotary tool sets, rotary tool accessories, and their new Versa cordless cleaning tool with Scrub Daddy pads.
This is not good for Lowe’s, but also cannot be good for Dremel. It doesn’t help that this was at the end of the aisle facing the wall display of tool boxes.
It looks like Lowe’s didn’t sell through their Craftsman cordless drill doorbuster deals.
I bought one a few years ago for testing, and it’s decent for the price. These should be flying off the shelves.
The racks were full with Craftsman air compressors, tool chests, a couple of nailers, and small shop vacuums.
The Klein’s displays at the pro center looked to have mixed success. The testing tool promos were partially sold through, but some of the promo boxes looked untouched.
Looking at Lowe’s website for the screwdriver set promo, all of the stores in my area have around the same inventory levels. It looks like nobody is buying this promo at any of them.
Black Friday was nearly two weeks ago. Some of these tool promos have been on the sales floor for 6 WEEKS already.
Maybe there will be a surge in gift purchases over the next two weeks?
Well-stocked promo displays are a good thing – they’re clean, neat, and look nice. But all that inventory reflects poor sales. Is it a foot traffic problem? From what I’m seeing, Lowe’s didn’t do very well with online tool deal sales either.
Do you know what I did not see? Any Bosch cordless power tools. Has Bosch gotten so popular that they don’t need to offer any cordless deals this year?
If any Home Depot corporate folks are taking this opportunity to laugh at how poor a job Lowe’s is doing selling tools, don’t worry – we’ll talk about your stores next.
