Home Depot and Lowes are absolutely department stores. You may be too young to remember what it was like before they existed (and yes there are long gone proto-bigboxes like Pergament that were popular in the the 1970s), but previously every trade had a specific store. Lumberyards carried lumber, and that's about it. Maybe some 10d common nails if you were lucky. In fact, you would go to one store for your dimensional lumber, a different store for your plywood and paneling, a different store for paint, a different store for hardware, a different store for appliances, electrical, plumbing, tools, draperies, flooring (tile or carpet? separate stores...) lighting fixtures, and then you had to go to a totally different garden center for all your outdoor needs. Now they are all departments within the same store.
Home Depot smells like a men's shelter/halfway house (it took me a couple trips to realize, why do I hate this familiar smell and not want to come back to this place).
It has the most bottom of the barrel staff and a lumber yard that sells... something... that barely qualifies as lumber. It is the epitome of modern American capitalism. It exists solely because it exists. No one would ever see a current Home Depot when visiting someone and say 'oh my god, please replace our current store(s) with this!'. But department stores used to offer experiences where people said that.
