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It has been a couple of months since The Home Depot opened its Home Depot Pro Store, an unabashed competitor of plumbing and HVAC wholesalers in the San Francisco area. The Colma, Calif., store represents a new approach for the building-center retail giant: Go after the professional contractors.
Amy Friend, a spokeswoman for The Home Depot, said the Pro Store was opened to provide better service for contractors than the very busy local Home Depot could offer.
But the Pro Store has not been particularly successful so far in attracting the targeted customers, according to neighboring wholesalers. And many of the contractors who tried the one-stop-shopping the Pro Store offers have returned to the more service-oriented, traditional wholesalers, said Robert Dodds, president of Curry Distributing Co. in Colma.
"When the first Home Depot opened several years ago, it hurt us about as much as anything could," Dodds said. "But since then, we've been getting a...