Why Does Ace Put a Sale in a Bucket? The Surprisingly Big Story Behind Hastings’ $5 Bucket
Photo by Ashley Media
At Hometown Ace Hardware in Hastings, $5 gets you a bucket, the money is donated, and qualifying merchandise you can fit inside is 20% off. But who invented the bucket sale—and how did an ordinary five-gallon pail become a vessel for something much bigger?
At Hometown Ace Hardware on South Frontage Road, one of the most interesting things in the store this weekend may also be one of the least glamorous.
It's a bucket.
Five gallons. Plastic. Handle included.
And for one weekend in Hastings, Minnesota, that bucket becomes something else entirely.
According to Justin from Hometown Ace Hardware in a HastingsNow visit, customers can buy a bucket for $5, the $5 is donated, and then fill the bucket with eligible merchandise for 20% off.
Tools?
Sure.
Early Christmas shopping?
Apparently.
YETI cups?
Justin says they're in.
And because this is a hometown hardware store, there is apparently popcorn waiting for you, too.
It's a simple promotion. It's useful. It's fun.
But standing there looking at a stack of buckets raises a surprisingly good question:
Who thought of this?
Who was the first person to look at a five-gallon hardware-store pail and think:
What if the bucket itself became the boundary of the sale?
HastingsNow went looking.
The answer turns out to be much more interesting than we expected.
So, who invented the bucket sale?
The short answer is: we don't know.
HastingsNow could not find a reliable historical source identifying a person, retailer, advertising agency or company that invented the broader idea of letting shoppers fill a bucket and discounting whatever fits inside.
And that's worth saying plainly.
The internet is very good at making uncertain history sound certain. An idea gets repeated enough times, one website cites another website, and eventually a guess starts masquerading as an origin story.
We couldn't find one.
What we can document is much better.
Ace Hardware's charitable version of the bucket sale has a surprisingly clear paper trail—and it leads back to 2013.
The Miracle Bucket appears
In July 2013, participating Ace Hardware stores were advertising a remarkably familiar proposition.
Donate $5.
Receive a five-gallon "Miracle Bucket."
Put qualifying merchandise inside.
Save 20%.
A contemporaneous July 19, 2013 report in Wisconsin described exactly those mechanics and said proceeds from participating stores there would benefit Children's Hospital of Wisconsin through Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.
That wasn't merely some isolated store improvising.
Nine years later, Ace Hardware itself described its August 2022 event as the company's 10th annual Miracle Bucket fundraiser. That chronology points directly back to 2013 as the beginning of the annual Ace Miracle Bucket tradition. Ace's 2022 description again used essentially the same formula: a $5 donation, a limited-edition five-gallon bucket and 20% off almost everything that fit inside.
So there is an important distinction.
Did Ace invent the bucket sale?
We don't have evidence of that.
Can the charitable Ace Miracle Bucket tradition be traced to 2013?
Yes.
And more than a decade later, the idea is still going.
The bucket came later. The giving started much earlier.
The charitable story behind the promotion stretches back another 22 years.
Ace's relationship with Children's Miracle Network Hospitals began in 1991. Today, Ace says its retailers, customers, vendor partners and corporate employees have raised more than $250 million for the organization over the course of that partnership.
The company's charitable programs now include register roundups, local fundraising events and the Miracle Bucket promotion. Ace says money raised for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals at neighborhood stores goes to the local member hospital serving that community.
And the bucket itself has become a significant fundraiser.
For the 2026 Miracle Bucket Days event, participating Ace stores around the country are again offering customers the familiar deal from August 7 through August 9: donate $5 for a bucket and receive 20% off almost everything eligible that fits inside. Some exclusions apply.
One children's hospital foundation says the 2025 Miracle Bucket campaign alone raised more than $1.6 million.
Think about that for a moment.
Five dollars at a time.
One plastic bucket at a time.
One neighborhood hardware store at a time.
Eventually, $1.6 million.
AI image by HastingsNow.com
Why is a bucket such a good sale?
This may be the most ingenious part.
Most sales communicate through numbers.
20% off.
Buy one, get one.
Spend $100, save $20.
A bucket sale turns the discount into a physical puzzle.
Suddenly the customer isn't merely shopping.
You're packing.
Could those work gloves slide beside the drill bits?
Will the batteries fit inside that empty flowerpot?
Can you stand the bottle upright and tuck the tape measures around it?
What about the YETI?
The bucket creates a hard boundary, and that boundary makes the sale fun.
You can see the deal.
You can carry the deal.
You can strategize around the deal.
And unlike a coupon that disappears after checkout, you go home with the bucket.
Perhaps that is why nobody seems particularly bothered that we can't identify the original inventor.
The idea has the quality of retail folk wisdom—so simple that you can imagine independent hardware-store owners arriving at it more than once.
Take one of the most ordinary objects in the building.
Make it the shopping cart.
Make it the rule.
Then see what people can do with five gallons.
In Hastings, the hardware store is still a local place
That matters here.
Hometown Ace Hardware sits at 1355 S Frontage Road in Hastings, and Ace's official store listing identifies it as a locally owned store operated by owner Jake Morri. The Hastings location offers everything from paint, plumbing and electrical supplies to tools, sporting goods, lawn and garden products, propane service, key cutting, screen repair and sharpening.
In other words, people rarely walk into a hardware store because everything is already perfect.
Something needs attention.
The faucet leaks.
The wall needs painting.
The screen tore.
The mower blade is dull.
The garden needs tending.
A hinge won't behave.
A mysterious screw has vanished into whatever parallel universe apparently contains every screw you've ever dropped.
Hardware stores exist because of a fundamentally hopeful proposition:
something that isn't working can often be made better.
You find the right part.
You ask somebody who knows more than you do.
You go home.
You try again.
And perhaps that makes a hardware store a particularly fitting place for a fundraiser.
The deeper meaning hiding inside a five-gallon bucket
There probably wasn't a philosopher sitting in an Ace marketing meeting inventing the metaphysics of the bucket sale.
That's part of its charm.
But the bucket contains a rather beautiful idea anyway.
A boundary can create abundance.
A bucket is useful precisely because it has limits.
Without sides, it can't hold anything.
During the sale, those same limits force a decision.
You have only so much room.
So:
What deserves a place inside?
That's a shopping question.
It's also a pretty good life question.
Much of modern life encourages us to make the vessel bigger.
More storage.
More money.
More stuff.
More hours.
More attention.
More options.
The bucket proposes the opposite experiment.
Suppose the container stays exactly the same size.
What would you choose?
What matters enough to make room for?
And then the charitable element changes the metaphor one last time.
You walk into the store thinking about what you're going to put into your bucket.
But part of the transaction is directed toward somebody else's need.
The act of filling becomes, in a small way, an act of giving.
Maybe that's the quiet genius of the whole thing.
Generosity doesn't require an unlimited vessel.
It only requires deciding that some of what passes through our hands should benefit somebody beyond ourselves.
The bucket has a bottom.
Generosity doesn't.
And maybe that's why it works in a place like Hastings
Big acts of philanthropy make headlines.
Million-dollar checks.
Hospital wings.
Foundations.
Galas.
Naming rights.
But communities are built just as surely from much smaller transactions.
Five dollars.
A volunteer shift.
A meal dropped off at someone's house.
Buying from the neighbor who opened a business.
Putting an extra school-supply item in the donation bin.
Checking on somebody after a storm.
Showing up.
Nobody confuses buying a hardware-store bucket with solving the world's problems.
That's not the point.
The point is that communities become communities through repeated, ordinary acts of participation.
And sometimes participation looks remarkably unremarkable.
Sometimes it looks like a white plastic bucket.
There is still one mystery left
We tried to find the Adam or Eve of the bucket sale.
We couldn't.
Maybe somewhere in an old Minnesota newspaper there's a 1987 hardware-store advertisement announcing 20% off whatever customers could cram into a pail.
Maybe an old True Value owner remembers doing it in 1974.
Maybe a farm-supply store tried the idea decades before the internet existed.
Until somebody produces the evidence, we don't know.
And that's okay.
Because "we don't know" is considerably more interesting—and considerably more honest—than inventing an answer.
What we can say is that by July 2013, Ace Hardware's charitable Miracle Bucket formula was unmistakably in the wild: $5, five gallons, a 20% discount and money raised for children's hospitals.
Thirteen years later, people are still carrying buckets through Ace stores.
Including here in Hastings.
What is the Hometown Ace Hardware bucket sale in Hastings?
For the local Hastings promotions, customers can purchase a $5 bucket, the $5 is donated, and qualifying items placed inside receive 20% off, according to Hometown Ace in a HastingsNow visit. The last promotion ran through Sunday, August 9, 2026. Individual products and brands may be excluded, so shoppers should confirm eligibility with the store before filling the bucket.
The national Ace Miracle Bucket event is also taking place Aug. 7–9, with participating stores raising money for local Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.
Hometown Ace Hardware is at 1355 S Frontage Road, Hastings, MN 55033. Its official Ace listing shows Sunday hours of 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
And yes.
Justin says there's popcorn.
One last question for Hastings
So now the bucket is yours.
Five gallons.
One handle.
A hardware store full of possibilities.
What are you putting in it?
And we have another question.
Do you remember a bucket sale older than 2013?
If there's an old hardware-store flyer, newspaper advertisement, photograph or receipt hiding in a Hastings basement, garage, scrapbook or filing cabinet, we'd love to see it.
Because somewhere out there may be the missing first chapter of this wonderfully strange little retail tradition.
Until then, perhaps the bucket's story doesn't need an inventor to have a meaning.
Hardware stores are places people visit because they believe something is worth taking care of.
Homes.
Gardens.
Tools.
Neighborhoods.
And every once in a while, a plain five-gallon bucket quietly expands the list.
The real question isn't only what you can fit into your bucket.
It's what good can come out of it.
