Yes, but selling stuff through Home Depot is a mixed blessing. Yes, you get lots of volume, but you are then negotiating very slim margins on those sales. There are all sorts of floor-planning, slotting, and co-marketing fees involved as well as delayed booking of revenue because the factory may still own the inventory on the shelves.
The other downfall of this is that the mom-and-pop local hardware stores cannot sell any mid-range machines because they cannot match the buying power and pricing of the big box stores.
When you need that lawn tractor fixed, Home Depot is not the place you are going to bring it, is it? What are they going to do, ring it up as a return and give you another one off the shelf?
Toro and Honda are / were playing the same game, but I don't think they are working it as hard as John Deere.
- Rick