New West Network

Shouldn’t Enviros be Blamed for Home Depot and Lowe’s Profit Drops?

By Matthew Koehler, New West Unfiltered 11-18-08

Today, Market Watch has an article concerning Home Depot's 31% drop and Lowe's 24% drop in third-quarter profits.

Interesting enough, neither Home Depot nor Lowe's – two of the biggest lumber retailers in America – blame their 3rd quarter profit drops on environmentalists or a lack of public lands logging, which is what Montana's logging industry lobbyists and many mill owners continue to do.

Rather, these giant retailers admit "The housing and home improvement markets remain challenging" and they are "seeing demand for their products being hurt by the macroeconomic backdrop of rising job losses, tightening credit and declining value of retirement funds that have all but frozen consumers' desires to spend."

We are, after all, in the midsts of the worst economic crisis in generations and America is experiencing the worst housing slump since the Great Depression and the steepest decline in lumber consumption ever. One has to wonder when these stark economic realities will sink into the heads of our local logging lobbyists.