What Day Do Stores Mark Down Clearance? Measured Across 9 Retailers
Every “best day to shop clearance” article says the same thing: markdowns happen midweek, go early, ask an employee. It is folklore, mostly inherited from how Target and Walmart stores worked a decade ago, and it is applied to every retailer as if they all ran on one calendar.
They do not. We track online prices at more than a dozen retailers and log every drop with a timestamp. For this post we pulled 60 days of drops, July 10 through September 5, 2026, and counted which day of the week each one landed on. The retailers below are the ones where we scan at least daily, so the day-of-week signal is the retailer’s behavior and not our schedule.
The table
| Retailer | Busiest markdown day | Share of drops | Second day | Drops counted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dick’s Sporting Goods | Friday | 61% | Thursday 19% | 69,824 |
| Walmart | Thursday | 57% | Wednesday 11% | 4,622 |
| Academy Sports | Saturday | 53% | Thursday 15% | 742 |
| Golf Galaxy | Friday | 50% | Monday 12% | 1,916 |
| Nordstrom Rack | Friday | 44% | Saturday 21% | 22,538 |
| Best Buy | Thursday | 43% | Tuesday 20% | 8,177 |
| Macy’s | Wednesday | 31% | Thursday 19% | 684 |
| Sam’s Club | Tuesday | 29% | Wednesday 25% | 1,012 |
| Newegg | Tuesday | 23% | Friday 16% | 57,661 |
A retailer with a clear markdown day puts half or more of its drops on that day. Four of the nine do: Dick’s, Walmart, Academy and Golf Galaxy. Nordstrom Rack and Best Buy are close, with a strong primary day and a secondary one. Macy’s, Sam’s Club and Newegg have no real day. They spread drops across the week and the “busiest” day is barely ahead of the average.
Friday is the sporting goods and off-price day
Dick’s is the most concentrated retailer we track. Sixty-one percent of its price drops land on Friday and another 19% on Thursday, so four in five markdowns arrive between Thursday and Friday. Golf Galaxy, which Dick’s owns, shows the same Friday spike at 50%. Nordstrom Rack puts 44% of drops on Friday and 21% on Saturday, so its weekend starts a day early.
If you shop any of these three, Friday morning is the check. Waiting until the weekend means the popular sizes have had a day to sell.
For Dick’s specifically, there is a second pattern: deep cuts to 40% off or more shift toward Monday, which takes 20% of those versus 7% of all drops. Friday is the broad batch, Monday is the cleanup. The full breakdown is in the Dick’s Sporting Goods markdown schedule.
Thursday is the big-box day
Walmart puts 57% of its online price drops on Thursday, with Wednesday a distant second at 11%. Best Buy puts 43% on Thursday and 20% on Tuesday. Both are consistent with how those chains have historically run weekly ad cycles: the new week’s pricing goes into the system Wednesday night and shows Thursday morning.
For Best Buy this is fresh data. Our Best Buy price history was rebuilt in mid-August after a catalog cleanup, so the Thursday number reflects about three weeks of drops. We would expect it to firm up rather than move as the log grows.
Saturday is Academy’s day, so far
Academy Sports + Outdoors is the newest retailer in our tracking and the only one with a Saturday peak: 53% of drops so far, with Thursday and Friday at 15% each and Sunday and Wednesday near zero. Academy’s own help page says its clearance rotates weekly, and Saturday appears to be the rotation day. This is based on one week of drop history, so treat it as an early read. Details in the Academy clearance guide.
Three retailers have no markdown day
Newegg is the clearest case. Tuesday leads at 23%, Sunday trails at 7%, and every other day sits between 10% and 16%. Newegg reprices algorithmically, a dollar or two at a time, every 0.6 days on median for any listing that moves at all. There is no batch to wait for, and most of the movement is noise. The Newegg price history breakdown covers how to filter it.
Macy’s peaks on Wednesday at 31%, which is real but weak. Macy’s runs “Monday Markdowns” as a promotion and takes clearance markdowns continuously, so the online price log shows a spread rather than a spike.
Sam’s Club splits between Tuesday and Wednesday at 29% and 25%. Sam’s has a separate problem: 99.96% of its online catalog shows no discount at all, so the drops we log are silent price changes with no badge. The day matters less than noticing the change happened, which is the subject of the Sam’s Club hidden clearance guide.
The check we run before trusting any of this
Day-of-week data from a price scanner has an obvious failure mode: if the scanner only runs on Fridays, every drop looks like a Friday drop. The test is to count how many distinct calendar days recorded at least one drop in the window. Dick’s recorded drops on 59 of 59 days. Newegg on 59. Golf Galaxy on 56. Macy’s on 52. Sam’s Club on 42. Academy on all 7 days it has been tracked. When the scanner catches drops every day and they still pile up on one day, the pile is the retailer’s doing.
Time of day is not usable for the same reason. Our scans run on fixed schedules, so the hour a drop is recorded reflects when we looked, not when the retailer acted. Day of week survives because every retailer here is scanned at least once a day. Home Depot is measured differently, at the store level rather than online, and its cycle is covered in the Home Depot markdown schedule.
What to do with it
- Dick’s, Golf Galaxy, Nordstrom Rack: check Friday morning.
- Walmart, Best Buy: check Thursday morning.
- Academy: check Saturday, provisionally.
- Macy’s, Sam’s Club, Newegg: there is no day. Set an alert on the item instead of a reminder on the calendar.
The folklore was half right. Midweek is real for the big-box chains. It is wrong for sporting goods and off-price, where the batch runs a day or two later, and it is irrelevant for the retailers that reprice continuously. The generic advice to “shop Wednesday” costs you the Friday batch at Dick’s and the Saturday rotation at Academy.
Every retailer in the table is tracked continuously, and each store page can be sorted by biggest drop in the last 30 days, which is the practical version of knowing the markdown day. Start at the retailer price trackers index.