I feel your frustration with Home Depot in particular - I live right in between two stores with wildly different layouts, and it drives me bonkers. One store seems to have the "traditional" layout, that I can successfully navigate off of general muscle memory from stores past. The other has departments placed so differently that I end up walking to where something "should" be, register I'm in the weird store, and open up the minimap in the app to find where I actually need to go.

From what I can tell, it's based mostly on optimizing to the local foot traffic. The one that throws me off seems to be more consumer focused. It's in a suburban area and has a _lot_ more internal space dedicated to home decor (lighting, curtains, flooring, etc). Then every other department seems to be rejiggered like Tetris blocks to fit within the remaining space.

The store with the more intuitive/familiar layout has mostly the same product assortment, but far less space dedicated to displays and "consultation" style areas (the consumer oriented store has an entire section carved out for custom curtains, complete with an associate consultation counter).

They could have a minimap at the start of the store to alleviate it too.

Perhaps they simply don't mind customers having to wander or ask though.