A $1,100 vanity. An $800 water heater. A $450 ceiling fan. All sold for just a single cent each.
TikToker Tylernap Deals has gone viral over and over again for finding “penny items” at Home Depot. By taking advantage of an internal loophole, he’s able to check out items worth hundreds of dollars for just a single cent—and though the practice might sound shady, it’s technically well within the law.
In Tylernap’s most-viewed video, he rolled up to self-checkout with 101 smoke detectors, normally worth more than $4,000—but Tylernap was able to ring them up for a total of just $1.01. When Home Depot employees saw what he was doing, they offered him a refund and accused him of stealing, but after a manager got involved, Tylernap was able to leave with his purchase.
That TikTok racked up 14.9 million views, with several other videos on Tylernap’s page garnering millions of views apiece.
Tylernap’s deal-finding strategy is thanks to a common practice at retail stores, where products that are discontinued, recalled, or otherwise need to come off of a store’s shelves are internally marked down to $0.01. Employees are expected to remove these penny items from the store floor, but if they’re left on display, customers are within their rights to purchase them for just a single cent.
How to track down penny items
Penny items’ extreme markdowns aren’t noted in stores or online for obvious reasons. That’s where third-party price checkers come into play, including one called Deal Soldier that Tylernap uses (and frequently plugs) across his videos.
The app, which runs inside of Discord, lets users enter their zip code and see the best deals near them at stores like Home Depot, Walmart, Target, and Lowe’s, including both standard clearance and penny item steals.
Deal Soldier was founded in 2024 by YouTuber Sean Sweeney, aka Super Unsexy, who’s been making guides to finding deals for years on the platform, even coining the term “hidden clearance.” The app offers a seven-day free trial, after which it has a subscription fee of $44 a month.
On Deal Soldier’s website, the app emphasizes that though penny items may seem too good to be true, they’re totally legal to purchase. “The customer pays the price the store has set in its own register system,” reads its guide to using Deal Soldier at Home Depot. “That is the standard retail transaction. No deception, no exploitation, no manipulation. The system price is the legal price.”
Though Tylernap sometimes comes into conflict with employees in his videos, Deal Soldier’s website reminds users to “always respect” store workers. “The penny game is about being fast enough to find the item before it gets pulled, not about working around staff,” it reads. Though Home Depot doesn’t have a public policy on its penny items, managers are allowed to refuse sales at their discretion.
Neither Home Depot nor Deal Soldier have responded to Fast Company’s requests for comment.