America's Depot Blog

How's business?
There are lots of ways to answer that question, and lots of ways to decide how well things are going in your business. You can look at your profits, your level of satisfaction, the percentage of growth in revenues...
One way you should be sure to measure your success is in productivity: how much you and your team can [...]

A recent poll of office workers found that more than 80% of U.S. workplaces provide free coffee. The custom began, it's said, in Buffalo, New York, when companies there began giving free coffee to workers in winter, and by the 1950s coffee breaks were included in union contracts.
Making people pay for break room coffee is enough to start rumors [...]

Tea is the most popular drink in the world, apart from water, but in the United States it trails behind coffee, sodas, beer, and milk.
That may be changing. The popularity of tea in the U.S. is increasing faster than that of any other beverage, partly because of its reputation as a healthy alternative.
"Tea" is used to refer to any [...]

We love Post-It Notes at America's Depot. We use them to organize everything from our thoughts to our major meetings, to color code work and office, and to communicate quickly with each other.
Should we feel guilty? After all, 40% of the waste stream in the U.S. is paper. Post-Its are definitely disposable. Maybe Post-Its don't have a place in [...]

Take the quiz.
What do your color preferences say about you -- and what does your personality say about your color preferences? Take the quiz to discover whether you're a sassy Jewel Pop or a dynamic Electric Glow!
Tell your friends, too. We're making a Pinterest Board for each of the color personalities -- come follow us at Pinterest and share [...]

Get into a conversation about guilty pleasures and you'll hear about your friends' overindulgence in shoe shopping, ice cream, reality shows -- and office supplies?
Seriously. All over the internet people are sharing the details of their obsessions with pens, folders, and desktop accessories. They're being sheepish about it, but they're out there.
Do you get excited when you get a [...]

There might be a little bit of hyperbole here, but break rooms see a lot of ugly stuff -- dirty dishes left to mold, coffee stirred with pens, stuff eaten with fingers that go right back to the phones.
It's always easier to change the environment than to change people. Stock the break room. Install a water cooler and soap [...]

Use binder clips to corral and contain power cords by clipping them together.
Clip them to your desk and let the arms hold your USB cables ready to hand.
Build cool desk sculptures.
Use one as a money clip.
Put them onto the rails of your hanging file folders to keep order between the files.
Build a diabolical office weapon.
Decorate them, as shown at [...]

You might have one horrible junk drawer, or you might be the kind of person who has nothing but junk drawers. Either way, it's time to get your drawers in order.
Why? Keep track for one week of how much time you spend poking around in drawers looking for things. Include the time you spend reading random paper you find [...]

Shockingly, more than half of businesses with revenues of one million dollars or less don't have a website. The last census actually turned in numbers even lower than that, possibly because it caught a lot of home business owners who didn't show up in the previous surveys of businesses.
Why do businesses try to manage without a website? Many say [...]