Yeah, I scratch my head every time I see a post where someone's ordering three Omnibuses or Absolutes or whatever through B&N. No way in hell would I trust them with heavy expensive nice books. All for, what?, so you can save like 5% more than what you'd get from IST? IST is a family business and an actual comic shop... and they know how to package big books so that you will get them in NM+ condition 99.9% of the time. Why would you not support that but risk a nightmare experience where you a) wait for weeks for B&N to finally ship your books, b) find out that they're in bad condition, c) deal with unhelpful customer service people so you can have the pleasure of repeating steps one and two once again? I don't get it.
I've used B&N's 3-for-2 deal before, but only for trades or thin HCs that I don't really care that much about.