That video above is from a year ago, but the current Home Depot fiscal situation is seemingly a lot better — their second-quarter profit just climbed 14 percent and they’re trading at around $88/share now (that’s up!). Check out this chart of their overall quarterly profit, too:
Here’s the interesting aspect, via Quartz. Home Depot calls larger contractors “pros.” They classify smaller contractors as, well, “smaller contractors.” Apparently sales to the former are doing well:
Home Depot executives noted that sales to larger contractors—known as “pros” in Home Depot lexicon—are outpacing sales overall at the company, which is a good indicator of the health of Home Depot’s housing-related business. However, sales to smaller contractors aren’t growing as fast. “We think a lot of these smaller pros in the depth of the housing recession really exited the business, to start to work for some of the larger pros,” a Home Depot executive told analysts.
Larger contractor sales are outpacing overall sales? The company has $23 billion in sales. You’d have to figure that if you take the high-volume of overall sales in concert with the “outpacing” idea, it means that Americans are (for the most part) investing back in their houses again. That has to be a generally good sign, right?
That said, there are widespread variations at the local level:
