Best Buy over the past few months has streamlined their clearancing system. It’s now easy to find out what’s on clearance, what will be on clearance, and how to get it. Unfortunately for Best Buy, it’s also very easy to exploit.

First, clearances are controlled on both a national and a regional level. The national level tells stores what to clearance, and what prices the clearance should range. The regional level decides when to price the items down, and has some discretion as to how long this will take. This is because many stores have different stock levels, and need to clear the floor space at different times.

The first way to tell if an item is on clearance at the store, is to look at the price tag. They will have the word Clearance in bold, but small print above the price itself. Larger tags may (but not always) are printed on yellow paper on a clearance item.

Okay, that’s nice, and there are many deals out there, but what if you’re in a big city that has a lot of deal shoppers? Chances are, they’re going to take all the clearance items you care about before you walk into the stores. Or, of course, the employees will…

So, what you can do, is buy the item in anticipation… early stores will be pricing items down, and you can then walk into your store and pay the full retail price. Then, go back 29 days later and price-match to the clearance price. While you’re sitting on the item, the clearance will likely spread to your store, and the markdown will take effect. Best Buy’s price-match policy is clear… you get the difference.

Worst-case, the clearance price doesn’t spread to your store, and you return the item. So, read the return policy, and avoid opening the item. This also works if a store is tiering the price-down and you pick it up with a clearance of, say, 10% off… when the price will eventually fall to 50 or 60% off.

There are many other factors, one of them being packaging. Many items are being replaced simply because the packaging or SKU number has changed, but are otherwise the same. So, you have to be on the look out for “older” packaging and SKU numbers.

Here are some examples. I’ve bought several Targus 15.4-inch laptop bags and backpacks for between $9.99 and $12.99. They normally retail between $49.99 and $69.99. I’ve bought Zune Home A/V kits for $20.99, normal retail for $79.99 (yes, to go with the $90 Zune). Motorola P790 portable chargers… regularly retail for $49.99, picked up for $12.49. And, Microsoft Wireless Optical Notebook 6000 mice for $7.99, retails normally for upwards of $39.99. Almost all of these items were on the rack at that price, no price-matching involved (just the mice actually).

This is just a primer… I’m not going to start a fight about what deal-tracking web site and community is better than the other. You can search away and find many with active communities tracking Best Buy clearances across the country. This article was written to show an inefficiency in Best Buy’s pricing system, and how it is extremely open to abuse.

What should Best Buy do? Well, they could alter their price-match policy to prohibit clearance prices… but people will just sit and wait. This is only partially effective. What Best Buy should do is implement fully national pricing and clearance pricing, and do so slow enough to make sure they can collect maximum profits… because eventually someone will probably buy it not looking to sell the item on eBay.