The edge-glued boards at Menards are quite good - they're foot wide "shelves" if you will made from glued 4 inch wide pieces; they work and are roughly as strong as normal boards at a cheaper price - and come finished.
Edge-gluing's one technique you'll find in woodworking books, for making large surfaces. Desktops or table tops made out of a single piece of lumber are wicked expensive, or practically impossible once you reach a certain size, so you join a bunch of smaller boards to make it happen. The really cheap & easy version of this skips the gluing and just frames them so they're smushed together, leaving visible seams and gaps like a slightly-tighter version of an outdoor picnic table (I've even seen this look imitated by solid table tops made from particle board and veneer, which... WTF? Those seams are crumb-traps! They make dealing cards a pain in the ass! Why would you go out of your way to have them?), but the better kind involves gluing.
I used one of their planed, unfinished edge-glued boards when I built my kid's bassinet. I was impressed by the uniform quality; it was almost as if it was a single board. Thanks Menards! (Full disclosure, my employer is technically a competitor, but we don't sell lumber.)
