Is there really a market for industrial supply company trading cards?

If you want to collect, just ask around. Post what you've got and what you're hunting, someone in a shop somewhere is sitting on a stack of the common ones and missing the one you pulled. And keep them flat, mine lived in a jacket pocket for a week and now they look like they were used to shim a pump base.

Seconding the flat storage thing. Mine sit in one of those cheap plastic sleeve pages from a card shop, tucked in the back of my binder of misc paperwork, and they still look factory fresh. The jacket pocket ones I mentioned? Yeah those were a lost cause.

Also on the trading side, our shop ended up with like five copies of the same bearing card because guys kept grabbing handfuls off the same booth table. Swapping duplicates with the maintenance guy from the building next door got both of us closer to a full set in an afternoon. Sealed pack though, I'd honestly leave it sealed just to see what happens to it.

Can confirm these are real, my boss brought a few back from IMTS a couple years ago. I've got a hex nut card that apparently nobody else at our place ever pulled, so maybe some are rarer than others. No clue if there's an official checklist though, seems like it's all word of mouth. Honestly half the fun is the absurdity of it. Keep yours sealed if you can resist, opened packs lose whatever novelty value they've got fast.

I organize mine by catalog section order, which turned into an afternoon-long project because the card numbers seem totally arbitrary and don't follow the part numbering scheme at all. One thing I noticed that might matter for the collector question: the spec lines printed on the cards can lag whatever revision is current online, so if you ever see two copies of the same card with slightly different dimension callouts or plating notes, you may be looking at two separate print runs. That seems like a way to date them, though I have no proof yet. Curious if anyone else has spotted this.