Comment by thephyber
3 days ago
HomeDepot is one of the few warranty retailers. The “Special Buy of the Day” is updated a few minutes after midnight and usually has power tools about 10% of the days or the year. Right now HD is running their “Black Friday of Spring”. Some of the best deals for hand tools are in-store clearance, so you just have to be in the store and find it (SlickDeals will try to announce those, but inventory for those are store-specific).
Sadly one of the best ways to get cheap Milwaukee M18 tools is the “hackable” sales from Home Depot: when 2 SKUs bought together makes them both cheaper, but if you buy them online and have the 2 SKUs sent to different HomeDepo stores, you can cancel one of the SKUs later and the non-cancelled one is deeply discounted. It’s probably a violation of ToS, but customer service reps allow it and support it, so maybe it’s not actually a violation… ? It feels like corporate may eventually ban users who abuse that and cost more money than they are worth.
Milwaukee doesn’t sell via Amazon or eBay and there are notoriously good Chinese clones on those sites.
I did get 3 decent Milwaukee (mostly M18) deals on Woot.com, but you have to jump on those quickly.
There is a great website that does good price history + price comparison between HomeDepo, Lowe’s, and WalMart but I can’t find the link. If anyone has it, please share.
> It’s probably a violation of ToS, but customer service reps allow it and support it, so maybe it’s not actually a violation… ? It feels like corporate may eventually ban users who abuse that and cost more money than they are worth.
I've done this at least a few dozen times over the past 4-5 years now. I have way more tools than is reasonable for my use-case. No problem so far.
From what I can tell HD doesn't seem to care much - the margin on these things has to be insane, so they are likely still making money on the transaction. Given how the discount is pro-rated across both SKUs you apply the deal to they likely did that on purpose. Who knows what rebates they are getting on the backend from Milwaukee on such promos, but I'd be surprised if there were none.
I imagine if you did this a dozen times in a given month they might ban you for outright suspected return fraud - but for most folks I don't think it's a major concern.