Lowe's vs Menards vs Home Depot Discount Programs

[Alex Huang]

I'd be curious to hear what everyone's experience or thoughts are on the various contractor services / bid programs offered by all the big box stores. Which one do you use, which do you prefer, and what about the specific store's program makes it better than the others?

I'll provide a brief summary of each from what I've learned speaking to the stores:

Home Depot - Loyalty credit card with a small % rebate on all sales. They also have a bid program where you can submit an order of $2,500 or more. They'll give an itemized discount, which varies from item-to-item.

Mendard's - Loyalty credit card with rebate as well. You build up a $6,000 minimum on your card and once that is exceeded, you get rebates on all the previous purchases + future purchases. Along with that you get a flat 2% discount on everything.

Lowe's - Loyalty credit card with rebate. Similar to Home Depot, you build out an order with all the items that you want and they send the order off to Corporate who provides an itemized discount.

[Wayne V.]

I'm a Home Depot Pro contractor and use the Pro Rewards program which allows job tracking as has been mentioned previously.  I also use the HD Project Loan program,  which at 8% is much less costly than hard money. The loan runs for six months and you only pay interest on what you use as it should be. I pay this one of when I flip the project and start a new one for the next project which also helps keep the individual job tracking much simpler. I have projects in the states and use HD for all of them. Depending on which state,  I also use HD contractors to do some of the work and use the project loan to pay for it. I just had hardwood floors sanded and refinished in a Connecticut house that we're flipping and the contractor did a great job for a very reasonable price. Same with the carpeting.