My Honest Weekly Clearance Routine (And What I Stopped Doing)

Why I’m Writing This

Most “clearance routine” articles I’ve read read like aspirational schedules — wake at 5, hit three stores, scan every aisle. I tried versions of that for about a year and burned out. What I actually do now is much less heroic and works better.

I track clearance across nine retailers, run a small flipping side project, and have a day job. The routine below is what survived two years of trial and error. It’s roughly 90 minutes a week.

Sunday Night: 15 Minutes Of Planning

Sunday around 9pm I open my own feed — Endless — and do three things:

1. Sort Home Depot by markdown_stage: penny at the three stores closest to me. If anything interesting popped up Saturday or Sunday, I’ll route there Monday.
2. Check the “Recent Price Drops” view across all retailers. I’m scanning for >50% drops on items I recognize. If I see something genuinely surprising — a $300 power tool at $89 — I’ll bookmark it.
3. Glance at Nordstrom Rack new arrivals in my saved sizes. NR carries roughly 119,000 SKUs across 245 stores plus online, and my tracker refreshes the catalog twice daily, so new stuff actually shows up.

That’s it. 15 minutes. Most Sundays I close the laptop without buying anything, which is the point.

Monday Morning: The Drive-By

Monday is the only weekday I’ll detour to a store, and only if Sunday’s check turned up something worth chasing. If nothing did, I skip the detour. This is the rule I had the hardest time learning.

If I do go: I walk the back of the seasonal aisle, the appliance scratch-and-dent area, and one specific endcap near hardware that my local store uses as a clearance dump. Twelve minutes, in and out. I scan anything tagged but not stickered using the Home Depot app — the app price beats the shelf tag about a third of the time.

The thing I stopped doing: walking the whole store. I used to do a full lap, hunting. The lap takes 45 minutes and the yield is the same as the targeted 12-minute version, because my Sunday scan already told me where the value is.

Tuesday: The Quiet Day I Don’t Skip

Tuesday is when Monday’s markdown wave finishes propagating. I don’t go anywhere — I just refresh the feed midday and check whether anything new dropped at the slow-updating store. If something did, I either grab it after work or send my partner. (She’s better at this than me. She finds things I’d walk past.)

Wednesday & Thursday: I Don’t Look

For about eight months I tried “checking daily.” It was a slow-motion form of decision fatigue and I bought a lot of marginal items because I was there and the price was kind of good. I now treat Wednesday and Thursday as no-look days. The world doesn’t end.

Friday: Nordstrom Rack Day

Friday morning before work I look at Nordstrom Rack specifically. NR’s clearance pattern is different from Home Depot — markdowns tend to drop overnight Thursday into Friday, and the deepest cuts hit on items that have been sitting in stock for 60+ days.

What I look for:

• Loafers and sneakers in my size, marked under $40. Filter is saved.
• Anything in the household clearance section under $20. Towels, sheets, kitchen.
• Designer denim under $50. This is rare but it happens 3–4 times a year and I always regret missing it.

Total time: 8 minutes on my phone.

Saturday: One Store, On Purpose

Saturday is the only day I commit a real chunk of time. I pick one store — usually whichever one has the most flagged items from the week — and I go in with a list. Not “let’s see what’s there.” A list.

The list lives in my phone notes app and looks like this:

HD #4218 – Penny Milwaukee impact, aisle 23 – .06 Behr quart, paint dept – Maybe: Husky tool chest closeout, back of hardware

I check the items, buy what’s still there, and leave. If I’m in and out in 25 minutes I’ve had a good Saturday.

What I Stopped Doing

The things I cut, in order of how much time they were costing me:

1. Reading Reddit clearance threads in real time. I used to refresh r/HomeDepot and the deal subs constantly. The signal-to-noise was bad, the FOMO was worse, and 90% of the “deals” posted had already sold through at my stores by the time I saw them. I now check those subs once a week, on Sunday, and only as a sanity check.

2. The “morning route” of three stores before work. This was unsustainable. Two of the three stores were 80% of the value. I dropped the third.

3. Penny-item hunting at distant stores. A .01 item 40 miles away costs me $14 in gas to claim. Unless it’s resellable at $80+, the math doesn’t work. I now have a 15-mile rule.

4. Browsing without a goal. This is the big one. Most of the bad-deal purchases I made in year one came from idle browsing. If I open the feed without a specific question (“anything new at store #4218?”, “any patio markdowns this week?”), I close it.

What’s Actually In My Phone

I keep four things on my home screen:

• The Home Depot app (for in-aisle barcode scans)
• The Endless app (saved searches for my three stores)
• Notes (for the Saturday list)
• A simple price-history bookmark for Camelizer (for Amazon resale comp)

That’s it. I uninstalled three other deal apps last year and don’t miss them.

The Honest Result

Two years in, the routine above gets me roughly $400–$800/month in genuine deals (savings or flips), at a time cost of about 90 minutes a week. The first year I spent triple the time for less than half the result. The difference was almost entirely about doing less of the wrong things, not more of the right things.

If you’re starting out, the single highest-leverage habit isn’t a store visit or an app. It’s the 15-minute Sunday plan. Without that, every other minute you spend is half blind.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time do you spend on clearance per week?

About 90 minutes total — 15 minutes Sunday planning, 12-minute Monday drive-by if warranted, a few mid-week checks on my phone, 8 minutes Friday for Nordstrom Rack, and ~25 minutes Saturday for one targeted store run.

Do you actually use your own product?

Yes — I built Endless because I wanted exactly this kind of feed across every store. I use it every Sunday night and most mornings. If it didn’t make my routine faster, I wouldn’t keep it as the centerpiece.

Is checking deals daily worth it?

In my experience, no. Daily checking led me to make worse purchases — there’s always something kind-of-on-sale, and I’d talk myself into it. A weekly cadence with one or two targeted check-ins works better.

What’s the one thing most people overdo?

Driving to stores. Most clearance is checkable remotely now. I’ll only drive when something specific is flagged. The “I’ll just stop by Home Depot and see what’s there” instinct is the single biggest time-waster I had to break.

What if I only have 30 minutes a week?

Spend it Sunday night doing the plan. Skip everything else. One focused 30-minute scan of every store within driving distance — sorted by markdown depth — beats five 30-minute walk-throughs of a single store.