I see your point about factoring and taking advantage of untrained clerks or stores. This also has something to do with why a lot of stores have a separate drawer for lottery transactions...
Home Depot, however, is most likely not necessarily involved in any such scheme and certainly does not intend for someone at the register on the returns desk to NOT know all the rules. In fact these returns people are usually the better trained ones there. But it was they who offered ME the cash... I was prepared to take the credit back onto my debit card upon returning said items I had already bought and earned miles for! I would have also taken a gift card for future use (which also would have thus yeilded those miles) but the guy said that since it was a debit card and they DO offer cash back on sales there, he could give me cash and it was just as easy--if not easier--to do so.
I guess I have to go back there and do it again--not necessarily to piss of the ethicists in here, but instead, to see for myself if that store MEANS to do this, and why they would want to? I may press the issue just ot find out a difinitive answer on this and thus, make a post revealing something as great and legit as say, the Jaguar thread has been! What an easy 10k, eh? Almost criminal!
But back to HD... What if THAT cash back thang is just their known policy and thus, it is a great thing for all of us?? What if they decided--based on some high-end company marketing scheme--that if people KNOW they can get cach back on some debit card returns, then this is what actually makes more of us choose to shop there rather than at the competition? (In my case, Loews was down the street, so lures are needed on a constant basis)
So if that were the case, they have fandangled their own numbers and stayed within some legal boundaries as far as we will ever know in order to lure people into their shop and make more money themselves!
I'm in and all for it!
MM
I will have to go check again and FACTOR in even more miles! There are more tiles to buy... and return.