It’s Black Friday again — at least for Home Depot.
For most of the retail industry, the majority of annual sales come between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when consumers are giving gifts such as big-screen TVs, clothing and toys.
But for the home improvement sector, Spring is the time of year when stores are most crowded and business booms.
To be ready, Atlanta-based Home Depot hired more than 80,000 temporary workers nationwide — with upwards of 1,200 of those jobs in metro Atlanta.
It's important to the company — Georgia's biggest by revenue — to get it right. The company is hoping to cross the $100 billion annual sales mark by 2018.
Home Depot kicked off its Black Friday event on Thursday — 11 days of specials online and in stores.
But just what does Home Depot sell this time of year. Here are some highlights of what the company said has moved in past Spring pushes:
· Approximately 3.76 million basil herb plants. Each plant produces enough leaves to be part of three large pizzas. That equals 11.28 million pizzas. If each pizza has eight slices, that would be enough basil to flavor 90.24 million pizza slices.
· About 47 million vegetable and herb plants grown in biodegradable peat pots. If these pots had been made of plastic, it’s estimated the total weight would equal about 11 million pounds or almost 6,000 tons of plastic displaced from the waste stream going into landfills.
· Approximately 2.3 million cucumber plants. Assuming each plant produces a conservative five cucumbers per plant, and each cucumber provides enough slices for three bowls of salad, the plants would yield enough slices to produce 35 million bowls of salad.
· About 18.8 million tomato plants. The average yield from a plant with good care is about 25 pounds of fruit, so at 18.8 million sold, the plants would yield about 470 million pounds of tomatoes
· Trimmer Line: 650 million feet of trimmer line or 123,106 miles. That’s enough to wrap around the world 4.9 times.
· Trimmers: 2.8 million units, one for every two babies born in the United States each year. Or more than six trimmers sold for each house purchased.
· Mowers: 1.3 million units, enough to cut the entire state of Maryland (if it were entirely grass or 20 million acres of lawn in the United States.
