Critique of Uchitelle
The article, Home Deport Girds for Continued Weakness, by Louis Uchitelle brings you into the thinking and mindset of Home Depot executives. The lead anecdote allows one to visualize money being moved from all of the stores back to the companies head quarters. This is a very visual
While the author does a strong job of making an economic piece visual, he misses some key points about the company. I think explaining more in-depth about the financial state of Home Depot would have been helpful. He writes about revenue for Home Depot. I think it would have been good to explain the same for its rival, Lowes.
I think Uchtille’s use of quotes to illustrate his points are not particularly exciting, but they are clear and to the point. I especially like the transition in this paragraph:
So he reversed, or halted, a decade of expansion. Starting in early 2007, he scaled back new store openings from one or two a week to just five all year. “When we were in our growth mode,” he said in an interview,” we would do like a heat map and we would say, ‘Look, southwest Cleveland, there is no store there.’ And we would put on there. That’s over.”
Uchitelle uses powerful verbs and moves the thought forward and personalizes the tone with the quote.
The one other thing I think the article is missing, is a clear transition from the use of loans to expanding a company. A stronger case could have been made to explain why loans are so vital to a companies expansion prospects and the relationship between loans and new stores or products.
Overall, I thought the piece was engaging and provided an interesting angle to the issues in the credit markets and housing. However, my main critizism is that it jumped around between different ideas, instead of sticking to a main theme.