The greatest irony of Home Depot 

Dear Tiffany:

Regarding the Sun Post article about Home Depot's presentation to the Village Council on June 6.

With all its slick petitions, ads and website, Home Depot maintains that if their oppostion's appeal to the Class II permit is successful, they will be "forced" give our community the kind of Home Depot they have claimed, for 18 months, to be so embarrassed about-- SW 8th Street. I’ve watched enough Sopranos to qualify that as a veiled threat. 

What kind of community goodwill can Grove residents truly expect from an entity that attempts to win them over with a thinly veiled threat?

How "gosh-darned" ashamed are they about the conditions on SW 8th Street that even on the eve of the presentation at the Village Council to try and win our community over, they don’t bother to clean up its act, as evidenced by the excellent 3-day old slide presentation by Grove resident Mel Meinhardt? 

This can only mean that they are either stupid or they think the community is stupid (or both).

As a public relations and marketing professional, I can tell you that slick websites and nice designs can’t accomplish half as much as an honest attempt to do something about their biggest source of bad PR.  But apparently when one is as big as Home Depot, little details don’t count. 

Alas, good PR is about little details.

Here's one for their PR department to consider: the cheesy attempt at a poignant closing argument in the last paragraph on the Grove Depot website opens with the Shakesperean-like observation, "Herein lies the greatest irony," which leads to the veiled threat.

No irony there, for regardless of Max Strang’s well meaning design, Home Depot can only give us what they’ve already been giving us these past 18 months: empty promises, lies and veiled threats-- only with more traffic. 

Herein lies the greatest irony: their introductory paragraph, (which also leads to the veiled threat-- as the entire website seems to do), refers to the "nearby 8th Street location."  They are actually underscoring the very first of the many reasons why we never wanted a Home Depot in the Grove.  We have already have one nearby.


Liliana Dones
Coconut Grove
Thursday, June 08, 2006