Basically what you are talking about are the $10 off coupons or 20% off coupons or something similar to that. You know what those are? They are employee perks.

The two companies hand them out to employees as bonuses, by the truckloads. What a lot of employees will do is go to their buddies and say, hey, you got that coupon with you? Well, you want to make some cash with it? How about if I offer you 25-30 cents on the dollar? Say, for every card you get with a face value of $20.00 I will give you 8 dollars (or something like that).

Then they take those cards and sell them on E-bay at 50% of face value or I don’t know, what they are selling for these days. This has been going on for over 5 years now. Lowe’s and HD are both aware of it, but its cheaper for them to give these cards to employees, because they found out that if an employee has a 20% off card if they spend more than $50, the average ticket that employee will spend is actually over $100! So the store makes more money. So for them it is clearly a win win.

I never buy those things because I consider it unethical to take a bonus from your fellow co-workers and sell them for a profit, something that they worked for, but hey, its America and it is perfectly legal. My business partner buys them by the hundreds whenever he can find them.