Home Depot Earnings Beat Expectations

Yesterday, home improvement giant Lowe's came up short of Wall Street expectations in second-quarter earnings.

This morning, its biggest rival -- Home Depot, the nation's largest home renovator -- beat expectations in second-quarter results.

Profit was down 7 percent and the company shut its high-end Home Expo remodeling centers, but the adjusted results beat Wall Street forecasts by nearly 10 cents per share.

Same-store sales were down 8.5 percent from the second quarter of last year, so the quarterly gains came from cost-cutting. Thus, Home Depot's results should probably not be used to gauge any sort of recovery in the housing sector.

Home Depot has been hammered in customer satisfaction surveys and has recently made a deep a sweep from top to bottom of the company, trying to retrain workers to serve customers better.

In University of Michigan consumer satisfaction surveys, Home Depot has consistently ranked at the bottom of "specialty retail stores" category.

-- Frank Ahrens
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