Giving these items to employees could be considered part of their compensation package, like gift cards. Those have to be appropriately recorded and taxed.

FWIW, a lot of these places now send damaged/surplus/whatever items to a salvage company, who then pays the original retailer “fire sale” prices. These items are usually auctioned off locally for a fraction of MSRP.

Same for many returned items, BTW. There’s a local auction site that runs like eBay, but it’s overwhelmingly Amazon returns.