Cathy Free
Bright orange signs inside Home Depot stores direct customers to items such as light bulbs, paint, power tools and plants.
At one store in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, the heating and air conditioning aisle has a different handwritten sign: “Please do not take Leo’s shirt off.”
It’s written on a cardboard box that often contains the store’s lounging tabby cat, an internet star who has a varied wardrobe, but often wears a striped T-shirt.
“People kept taking Leo’s shirts off because they thought he was hot,” said shopper Jeff Simpkins, who works as a commercial floor installer in Mount Laurel, and is a regular at the store.
Employees initially bought the cat T-shirts and dressed him up to keep him from removing a bandage after a trip to the vet to treat a scratch on his skin.
“Then they kept dressing him because they thought he looked cute,” Simpkins said.
Simpkins first met Leo in June when he was shopping at the store and came across a cat tree, a used litter box and a large planter filled with pillows and plush toys in the garden centre.
Simpkins is a cat lover with two cats at home named Will and Grace. He said he figured there must be a cat living in the store, so he asked an employee, who led him to the heating and air-conditioning aisle and introduced him to Leo.
“I thought he was a pretty cool, plump-looking cat. He was also very friendly,” Simpkins said. “I’ve always been a cat guy, and I wondered if there was something I could do for him.”
The employee told Simpkins the cat was adopted by staffers from an animal shelter about a year ago to help with a rodent problem at the store.
Employees take turns cleaning Leo’s litter box, filling his food and water bowls and changing his T-shirts, Simpkins said.
“I learnt that he lived there year-round, and they didn’t close the store until they could find Leo and put him in the climate-controlled garden centre for the night,” he said.
Simpkins decided to start visiting Leo several days a week. During one of his visits in June, he took along his cat Will, and he decided to shoot a video and put it on TikTok.
The video, which showed Leo lounging in a planter in the garden department, quickly racked up more than 1.5 million views and hundreds of comments.
“I’m complaining to my local Home Depot, we don’t have a Leo,” one of his followers commented.
“He needs a Home Depot vest ‒ he’s working hard!” suggested someone else.
“He’s an emotional support animal for everyone who spends too much money there,” another commenter noted.
Simpkins made regular TikToks, hoping the attention would help draw awareness to the importance of adopting homeless cats.
He posted Leo in his element, greeting customers, being dressed by employees, napping in the toilet aisle and hanging out on tall shelves.
A video of the cat being locked into the garden centre at night has amassed almost 13 million views.
In total, Simpkins’s Leo videos on TikTok have been viewed more than 35 million times, he said.
“A lot of people who live around here tell me they started coming in to visit Leo after they saw one of the videos,” Simpkins said.
Sometimes they bring cat treats when they stop to pet him and praise him, but that hasn’t stopped his mouse control and he always eats what he catches.
The cat has been known to occasionally chase customers’ dogs around the store, but Leo generally gets along with everyone, Simpkins added.
Although he bought Leo a new cat bed, he said the dapper feline seemed content to lounge on top of cardboard boxes or inside of them, which at this store, is like reaching feline nirvana.
Customers who come to the store to visit Leo enjoy the challenge of finding him, he said, since the cat roams wherever he likes, from the bath and hardware sections to the door department ‒ probably Leo’s least favourite place, since cats famously hate closed doors.
“You’ll find him almost anywhere, but the strangest place I’ve found him is in the plumbing aisle, curled up inside a box, sleeping on top of some of the merchandise,” Simpkins said.
“Like any cat, he’ll sleep anywhere,” he said.
The Independent on Saturday