I am worried that inputting skus in brickseek alerts a select group of people about the deals which are then scooped up. Happened to me this last week on an item that had been sitting stashed away in inventory for over a year. A couple hours after I found it, I went to purchase and saw it being carried out of the store by someone else. What are the chances?
/paranoid mode
I used to be a premium brickseek member. I'll tell you how this pyramid scheme works:
1. Free users search their website or post deals on their fb page
2. They delay releasing the posts on fb for a couple of days, and instead post the deals on a private forum only premium members can access. So if you post a deal on their fb page, you wont see it for 2 days. Meanwhile premium members will be buying up all the inventory of the item.
3. Every time you search brickseek.com for an item they track it. If all of a sudden they see a surge in people searching for an item, this shows up in a "popular deal" section that is only available to premium members. Again, they will see what is popular and buy up all the local inventory to resell, before you even hear of the deal.
4. They also have an extreme premium membership that gives you a list of all the deals in one handy page. This is great for resellers because you can go to a store and see all the deals in one handy page and buy everything up.
So I think of it as a pyramid scheme - the free users search or submit the deals - those are funneled up to paying premium members - and those deals are funneled up to paying extreme premium memberships who are mostly resellers. The people at the top - extreme premium members - get all the deals first. The people at the bottom - free, normal users, rarely find deals because by the time they hear about a deal, the premium members have already ransacked all the local stores.
So the short answer is never search bs, especially for lowes items. It is very easy using lowes website to see what all the local stores have in stock. If you search brickseek all you are doing is helping the resellers who pay for a premium membership to buy everything near you.