The protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taking place at home improvement giant Home Depot (HD) took on a new and disturbing dimension recently, as reports noted that one such protest managed to shut down an entire store location. That news did not sit well with investors, who sent Home Depot stock down fractionally in Thursday morning’s trading.
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Reports note that a Home Depot in Ladera Heights was actively shut down on Sunday following a protest that focused on Home Depot’s “complicity” in “violating civil rights.” It was staged under the “Scrape ICE” banner of protests, which seek to bog down store operations by sending large numbers of protesters into the store to buy an inexpensive ice scraper, then promptly return the item for a full refund minutes later.
It only took about 20 demonstrators for the Ladera Heights Home Depot management to just close the location down, obliging everyone in the store—protester or not—to exit. This was enough for the protesters still in the store to be greeted with cheers and singing upon their exit. The store itself, meanwhile, reopened later. While the store likely lost some revenue—this was a Sunday afternoon, after all—the Ladera Heights store closes at 8 PM on Sundays regardless according to reports, so the losses were comparatively light.
A Creative Way to Help
Home Depot locations also teamed up with the House of Neighborly Service in Loveland to give locals a hand in a tangible—and oddly creative—fashion. Home Depot brought out its orange buckets, and filled 60 of them with cleaning supplies the store chain typically stocks, along with a simple toolkit.
These are some of the things that first-time homebuyers simply do not consider when moving into a new home, and the combined effort helped to bridge the gap. The total cost to Home Depot was about $5,000, reports noted, and also included commonly-requested items at the House of Neighborly Service’s food pantry like toilet paper and paper towels.
Is Home Depot a Good Long-Term Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on HD stock based on 17 Buys, five Holds and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 7.18% loss in its share price over the past year, the average HD price target of $407.67 per share implies 6.08% upside potential.
