- Joined
- Jan 22, 2012
- Messages
- 5,078
- Reaction score
- 1,656
See a few posts up. Gateway location was built because the Mystic Ave. location was oversaturated. Different clientele. Mystic/Gateway tilts very heavily to professional contractor business. It's a zoo during peak pickup hours when construction workers do a pit stop there off 93 to load up for the job site. And the inside is a disaster area in the immediate hours after they all leave and head back out on 93. It got so day-to-day unmanageable that the Gateway location went up just to serve general clientele. Gateway's cleaner, better-organized, less-hectic. Still tops the whole plaza in business. But they will never ever give up Assembly because contractor business is HD's single-biggest moneymaker, and that traffic doesn't migrate across the river if they go out of eyesight of an easy 93 interchange. That store is a sacred cow to Home Depot national HQ. Hell, it's a sacred cow to Assembly.
So when Somerville talks about ED for Assembly Square, they're talking about the one site that won't willingly sell... Home Depot, and not the other sites (many of which are controlled by Federal Realty anyway).