Retail History | Home Depot — Store 101 on Memorial Drive

People treat Home Depot as an Atlanta headquarters that opened already orange and already national.

Store 101 opened here, on Memorial Drive just inside I-285 in DeKalb County, on 22 June 1979. A second store opened the same day on Buford Highway in Doraville. Both were leased Treasure Island boxes that J.C. Penney no longer wanted.

Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank had been fired from Handy Dan in California. Ken Langone told them they had been kicked with a golden horseshoe. They came to Atlanta with a warehouse idea: lumber, paint and fixtures on one floor, staff who had used the tools, prices written for people who would do the work themselves. On opening day Blank's children stood outside handing out dollar bills. At closing they still had handfuls left. A newspaper advertisement they had paid for did not run.

The Memorial Drive box later became a county tax office. A newer store on Lawrenceville Highway replaced it around 1994. The corporate campus in Cobb County is later still. The first Home Depot was a recycled discount shed on Memorial Drive, not an orange palace designed from scratch.