Interpreting CVS Clearance
Sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t.
Luck was with us today at the Fairhope CVS store. We walked in to find 2 Mega packs of Huggies diapers on clearance for $4.49 in the exact sizes we needed. Sold! Using the $2 Huggies coupons we got these for $2.49 each.
Look for these clearance tags on the bottom shelves at your local CVS store. Most stores have a end cap or in this case a shopping cart with clearance items.
CVS has five clearance stages that products go through. There are four separate tags marking each stage of clearance. The price of the product will be marked with a green sticker.
There are no standard policies on how and when products will hit each stage. If you have a store that follows the clearance process exactly this is what you will find with five stages of clearance:
Stage 1 “Clearance” Product is still full price but this will tell you that the item is being discontinued. So look out for it to be pulled to another stage shortly. This could be 1-2 weeks depending on the store and staffing.
The next four stages will give you the new price of the product.
Stage 2 “Clearance 25% off you pay $”
Stage 3 “Clearance 50% off you pay $”
Stage 4 “Clearance 75% off you pay $”
Stage 5 Item is typically removed from the shelf and placed in separate clearance area. This could be a shopping cart, end cap or a table near the front registers. The item will now be marked 90% off.
Sometimes products, like in our example, may skip to the last two stages of clearance. Don’t rely completely on these stages, shortage of staffing or communication between the management and store employees, products may not be marked correctly with the appropriate tags.
It is also important to know from store to store what has been marked down or discontinued. All stores do not operate on the same schedule. For example you could see these Jumbo Huggies diapers go on sale at another store in the next couple of weeks.
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