Home Depot Stock (NYSE:HD) Slides on Plan to Increase Military Post Connections

It is no secret that home improvement giant Home Depot (HD) has focused on its connections to America. Between its founder's support for President Trump and its routine support for American institutions, Home Depot seems to enjoy projecting the image that it is an America-first operation. It also has several military connections, and recently augmented these with a new plan for military post operations. Investors were skeptical, though, based on the over 3% drop seen in Home Depot shares in Wednesday morning's trading.

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Basically, Home Depot wants to get soldiers their orders faster, and is building up its connections to military post operations and exchange deliveries in aid of that. Now, Home Depot delivery will include Army Post Office (APO), Fleet Post Office (FPO) and Diplomatic Post Office (DPO) addresses. That means that orders going to those addresses will now receive tax-free access to Home Depot's substantial catalog of over 20,000 products.

Military exchange shoppers will be able to place orders online and have those products delivered directly to military bases throughout the world. This also should prove helpful for the military families living on over 750 overseas bases. Ultimately, this should go quite some way toward helping make Home Depot a major force in the home improvement efforts of overseas military and their families.

Extra Rewards

Home Depot's ongoing push to reach the professional market is still going well, and recently, Home Depot expanded its Pro Xtra Rewards system to offer more for those professionals who fill their orders with Home Depot merchandise. Pro Xtra Rewards now includes a range of options including $20 off orders of $100 or more at Jimmy John's for lunch, or 20% off orders of Tecovas work boots.

Home Depot is also refreshing the offers on a quarterly basis, in a move designed to keep the offers fresh and relevant. Executive vice president of pro for the Home Depot, Mike Rowe, noted, "Our Pro customers live on the go. They are managing crews, bouncing between jobsites and working long hours. Two-thirds of our Pro online users leverage The Home Depot app regularly to help manage their business, projects, orders and more, so it only made sense to embed these new partner offers right inside the app to give them a frictionless way to access them."

Is Home Depot a Good Long-Term Buy?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on HD stock based on 18 Buys and seven Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 6.96% loss in its share price over the past year, the average HD price target of $379.72 per share implies 13.73% upside potential.