Amid Immigration, Home Depot Adds Spanish

Starting now, Home Depot's in-store signage in all new stores will include Spanish as well as English, the company says.

From fiberglass (fibra de vidrio) to masonry (mampostería), and fasteners (sujetadores) to mops (trapeadores), bilingual signs already greet customers at Lowe's and Home Depot in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Ikea in Elizabeth, N.J., from the moment shoppers cross the entrada. The signs are recognition of the growing consumer clout of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the city, and also are a way for New Yorkers who are native English-speakers to practice their Spanish.

"It's pretty simple," said a contractor in Park Slope, Gordon Vollmer: the stores, he said, have Spanish customers with money to spend.

But bilingual signs and other linguistic evidence are really the tip of the iceberg, said a professor of globalization and education at New York University, Marcelo Suárez- Orozco. He said that America was in the middle of the largest wave of immigration in its history, with more than half of all immigrants coming from Latin America — 40% from Mexico alone. Wealth generated by Spanish speaking residents in America will approach one trillion dollars by the end of the decade, he said.

Companies like Lowe's and Home Depot have woken up to this. Lowe's, which serves significant Spanish-speaking population in Sunset Park-Industry City, has had bilingual signage for about three years. Home Depot, nearby on Hamilton Avenue, has had bilingual signage since its opening in 1998. The bilingual signage includes large overhead directional signs and smaller category signs. In addition, many individual items have product labels and packaging in both English and Spanish.

A spokeswoman for Home Depot, Jennifer King, said starting in the first quarter of 2007, all new stores and other stores being updated would receive bilingual directional and promotional signs. She said their Manhattan stores on 23rd Street and Third Avenue had bilingual directional and general merchandise signs but also used signs with photography and icons to help customers navigate the store regardless of the language one speaks.

According to the 2000 census, 411,346 Brooklyn residents – nearly one out of five – speak Spanish. A report by the New York City Department of City Planning show that Mexicans had the largest growth among major immigrant groups between 1990 and 2000, quadrupling in New York City. In 2000, Mexicans were the largest foreign-born immigrant population in Park Slope (10.5%) and, after the Chinese, the second largest in Sunset Park-Industry City (14.2%).

Credit card applications, brochures for materials such as roofing accessories, and fliers describing how to call ahead or order construction materials by fax are printed in Spanish and English and lay in racks at Lowe's.

A customer there, Alberto Renteria, who was born in Mexico and founded Renteria's Construction in Brooklyn, said the dual language signage was considerate to Spanish-speaking customers.

Walter Jaico, who works for a contractor in New Jersey, said the bilingual signage saves time.

Although the Peruvian born Mr. Jaico reads the signs in English, he said co-workers often find the Spanish signs helpful in locating items in the store. A commercial sales specialist at Lowe's, Stephen Lach, said, contractors want to get their material and get out, he said.

Mr. Jaico shops at Home Depot about twice a day. On Wednesday morning he was weighing the purchase of a Honeywell thermostat, which also bore the name "termostato" on its package.

Despite the use of Spanish signs, English was the sole language spoken over intercoms at both Home Depot and Lowe's, chirping above the sound of forklifts and the scrub of carts and hand trucks on the floor.

Mr. Lach demonstrated a truly multilingual facet to the store: its telephone information help line, with access to translators in 140 languages.

A spokeswoman for Lowe's, Maureen Rich, said this was all part of the store's effort to make customers be comfortable while they shop. Spanish, she said, had "market relevancy" in Brooklyn, whereas in San Francisco, they have store signs that include Chinese.

According to the U.S. Census, the number of Hispanic-owned businesses grew 31% between 1997 and 2002, three times the national average. It is no wonder there are so many Spanish-speaking customers at home improvement stores, since the Census showed that in 2002, almost a third of Hispanic-owned firms were in construction and other services, such as repair. New York State accounted for just more than 10% of Hispanic-owned firms in the nation.

Not everyone who can speak Spanish is happy with bilingual signage. Santiago Davila, who came to America in 1948 from Puerto Rico, said his mother always emphasized the importance of learning English. He said Spanish signs work against that notion of a language shared in common.

But the Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz, summed up his view in this way: "Brooklynites speak 136 languages, so the more multilingual businesses we have, the better it is for our residents – que rico, how sweet it is!"