Sticker Stash
I’m not sure if they do this anymore, but many years ago, while I was an employee at HomeGoods, the store had this promotion where employees could get these scratch-off cards that reduced the cost of an item by one, five, or twenty dollars each time they found a price sticker on the floor.
Each card had three scratch-off areas, and the catch was that you could only scratch off one. However, if you used a lamp, you could see which scratch-off area was the $20 one, meaning that you could very easily rack up a 20 dollar gift card for every sticker you found on the floor.
The idea was that if employees collected these fallen stickers, regular, nefarious shoppers couldn’t stick them on something of far greater value and check out at that price. There were no rules on how many an employee could have, or combine, because most folks who worked at that store were middle-aged women who really couldn’t care less, and most of the stuff HomeGoods sells is garbage.
But then there was me…a starving, broke college kid, who got paid horribly, but who worked in the back room unloading trucks, and who also was occasionally tasked with stocking shelves. In short, I was the only person who seemed to care about this promotion, and my bosses, who wanted to show their higher-ups that they were putting the corporate programs into effect, were happy to oblige each sticker I presented with a scratch-off ticket of my own.
Now HomeGoods, while normally a purveyor of fine garbage, also occasionally has very nice, very high-end, housewares on the cheap (comparatively). These items, like cookware, linens, comforters, etc are more often than not, usually much more expensive than the rest of the store’s stock, and take a while to sell.
For me, the guy who unloaded the trucks, this meant that when I saw something absurdly nice, I could put it very high up into a loading bay, and just let it sit for a while because the senior citizens I worked with would never go up to get it.
At the end of a four-month summer, I’d amassed about 1100 in these little gift cards, and with them I bought: A full set of AllClad copper core cookware (a new piece came in once a month), a queen-size down comforter, duvet cover and sheets, pillows, nice flatware, plates and glasses, and a dozen useful kitchen tools.
To this day, ten years later, I still have all the AllClad, which alone retail for $800, and some of the kitchen tools. All of it for free.