Tag Archives: Home Depot

Earth

Dead Cats Being Found At Florida Home Depot- Group Wants Answers

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Warning- this article includes disturbing images.

Home Depot Pressed for Answers As New Tip Emerges About Missing Cats

LAKE CITY, Fla. (Oct., 2026) — Community cats Onyx and Sunshine were found dead beside their food bowls at a Lake City Home Depot store in mid-September. Other cats from their colony subsequently disappeared after a contractor began trapping cats at the property. Despite receiving thousands of emails from In Defense of Animals supporters demanding answers, the retail giant has not revealed where the remaining cats are, or what happened to them.

Many Home Depot Stores All Over North America Have “Store Cats”

The Ranch Rescue Fights Back

The Ranch Rescue is an animal welfare group and a community of cat advocates, concerned residents, and animal protection supporters and says it has received a significant tip and is investigating new information about the missing cats. The group is preparing to share its findings publicly.

“They had no voice to cry for justice, so we became their voice. And we will not be silenced,” said The Ranch Rescue founder Laura Rister.

For approximately six years, eight cats lived at Home Depot Store #6864, fed and monitored by a longtime caregiver with the permission of store management. All had been sterilized and vaccinated through a trap-neuter-return program. 

Trapping And Removing Cats

In mid-September, the caregiver discovered Onyx and Sunshine dead near their food bowls. the store manager told her she was barred from the property and would be trespassing if she returned, and an outside company began trapping and removing cats, according to The Ranch Rescue and News4JAX.

Four cats — Tortie, Jr., Bentley, and Nikko — remain unaccounted for, according to In Defense of Animals.

The Home Depot has said it uses third-party contractors to humanely capture and relocate animals, but has not publicly identified where the missing cats were taken or provided documention about their fate. The Home Depot did not respond to a request for comment from News4JAX in September. The Ranch Rescue has secured legal representation for the caregiver and continues seeking answers.

Two cats are dead, others have disappeared, and The Home Depot still hasn’t explained what happened to them.

These were living, feeling individuals who were loved and cared for over many years, not disposable objects.  Lowe’s went to extraordinary lengths to find one missing store cat, engaging staff and the community to mobilize drones, cameras, and professional trackers to bring her home.  Surely The Home Depot can at least account for the cats removed from its property. We’re demanding answers for every cat, and a companywide policy to ensure this never happens again.

In Defense of Animals and Ranch Rescue are calling on The Home Depot to provide a complete, cat-by-cat accounting, including trapping, transportation and veterinary records, and to adopt a humane companywide policy protecting established community cat colonies.

Members of the public can take action now by contacting The Home Depot, posting with #WhereAreTheHomeDepotCats and writing to the company’s leadership.

For the Silo, Fleur Dawes/IDA.

Featured image- Home Depot cat “Leo”

Vintage

An Evolution Of Canadian Shopping Consumers Distributing Style

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As a technology writer for the Silo, I am always focusing and thinking about the evolution of technology. I write about how computers and video games have changed over the years, but of course, many other things change around us and the one I have been thinking about a lot lately is shopping. ( Consumers Distributing may be back,  the relaunch namesake follows us on Twitter  )

CD had some serious PPMP’s (Portable Personal Music Players)- notice how the colour and graphic schemes are totally late 80’s/early 90’s?

When I was a kid, I remember getting the Consumers Distributing catalog and taking it into my room to read thoroughly. Of course, I tended to go directly to the toys section and more specifically I looked at the video games and computers. I dreamed about the day I would own some of these items, and I patiently saved my pennies from my job as a paper route carrier. Life can be tough when you are 12.

Started in 1957, Consumers Distributing tried to save costs for consumers by creating a warehouse like environment that allowed them to operate in smaller locations.

Customers would typically shop through a catalog (which they could take home or use in-store) and fill out a request form. This form was taken to the counter where a customer service representative would go fetch your item(s) and ring up the sale.

At its peak the chain would grow to 243 outlets in Canada and 217 in the United States. By 1996, however, the customers were fading as frustration grew with items being out of stock (or, more accurately, the customer perception was that items were always out of stock). In 2006, the company appeared to emerge from bankruptcy protection but little has been done to revive the stores to the way they once were.

Nothing says vintage or captures the ‘aura’ of shopping in a Consumers Distributing store quite like a polaroid.

Even though the end of the chain could be considered a failure, the evolution of the concept continues to this day. Stores like Home Depot and Costco operate in a warehouse-like environment, there are just no catalogs.

Canadian retail giant Hudson’s Bay Company also thought it was a pretty good idea since they purchased and ran a competitive chain of stores called “Shop-Rite” that were open from 1972 to 1982.

.At its peak, Shop-Rite had 65 stores in Ontario before conceding defeat to Consumers. It wasn’t the competition that was really the problem, it was the concept.

With the recent closing of the retail operations of Blockbuster and Rogers Video, we are seeing another step in the evolutionary process. Decades from now, people will probably think it was quite strange to obtain our movies from a retail store because everything will be digitally beamed into our homes and the physical disks and tapes we use now will be completely gone.

My friend Dave Thielking is a lot like me and he remembers the days when we were kids flipping through those catalogs.

So when he obtained some old catalogs I knew we could work together to put them online and share with our other friends who remember the old days of shopping and the great toys and items we wanted to save our pennies for. The result is a new website called the Consumers Distributing Archive and you can find it at http://www.cdarchive.ca.

We are never going to be able to stop evolution – of any kind – but it doesn’t mean we have to like it, or that we can’t go back to the way things were even just for an afternoon or two. For the Silo, Syd Bolton.

Sci-Tech

Auto Clean Your Grill With Advanced Bluetooth BBQ Robot Available Now

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Keep grime at bay with the perfect, must-have holiday gift for every busy person who loves gadgets and useful technology. Grillbot is the world’s first automatic grill cleaning robot.

Grillbot makes life much easier for BBQ chefs. It saves them time and lots of dirty work cleaning grills and letting them get back to spending more quality time entertaining family and friends. The award-winning Grillbot takes the time and effort out of cleaning even the dirtiest grills.

Designed for use on any style grill, simply place the Grillbot on the grill’s surface, press a button, and the robot does all the cleaning. The device is driven by a powerful CPU that controls movement, speed and direction of brushes. It comes with an LCD alarm and timer that can be set for a light scrub, deep clean or something in between, and notifies when cleaning is done. 

 The innovative Grillbot comes in four colors and includes the following features:

  • Three high-power electric motors
  • Smart Brain that controls movement, speed and direction of the brushes
  • Brushes pop right off to put in dishwashers for easy cleaning
  • Rechargeable lithium ion battery

The Grillbot comes as a standalone grill cleaner, or an optional bundle with a carrying 3 brass brushes installed and a carrying case. Grillbot has already sold over 100,000 units globally, including in new markets such as Russia, Australia, Canada and Brazil. The Grillbot is $99.95USD and comes with a one-year warranty. 

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, in January 2017, Grillbot  demonstrated its advanced technology with the Bluetooth-enabled Grillbot Pro. It comes with the same, great features as the original plus the addition of Bluetooth technology, giving BBQ chefs even more freedom and leisure time to watch games, relax with family or cater to guests. 

Grillbot is now available at over 500 Home Depot stores nationwide. It’s also available at a wide variety of other retailers such as ACE Hardware, True Value, Sur La Table, Lowe’s, and at websites Amazon.com, Bedbathandbeyond.com, Walmart.com and more or contact marketingdirector@thesilo.ca.  For the Silo, Jennifer A. Marca.

About Grillbot
As with most inventions, Grillbot began with an idea. One day, founder Ethan Woods was getting ready to use his grill and did not have a brush available to clean it. While trying to clean a stubborn grill with a wire brush, he wondered if a robot could be created to do the job. He took a power drill, attached a brush and cleaned the grill. He put together a design team and that makeshift drill became the sophisticated computer-driven Grillbot! Since then, Grillbot has sold over 100,000 units and has received many awards and accolades for its innovative design. Grillbot continues to expand its line and is developing two new home robotic solutions designed to simplifying your life one robot at a time in 2017.