HOUSTON – If you are a bargain hunter, you need to get on the Walmart hidden clearance bandwagon. Shoppers and influencers are posting videos and pictures all over social media of great deals they’re getting at Walmart by finding products on super steep discounts.
Kendall Motzny is “The Freebie Guy.” He said the premise of Walmart’s hidden clearance items is that store employees are not updating the price tags when products are marked down.
“You basically don’t trust the tag,” he explained.
When you download the Walmart app, you can use the built-in price scanner in the store to scan items. Shoppers are finding items as cheap as 3 cents!
Last year at the end of the Spring season, The Freebie Guy found dozens of bulbs in the garden center that were actually 3 cents each.
“I was able to get $250 worth of these bulbs and I paid like $2 for all of them,” The Freebie Guy recalled.
Making money from hidden clearance
Tomball bargain hunter Judy Lynn scours Walmarts for hidden clearance items that she then sells to make some extra money.
“Everybody’s struggling right now,” Lynn said. “I don’t have a lot of money, so I can turn around and make a little cash,”
Lynn showed us her latest haul. She found 15 air hammers at one Walmart for $2 each, down from the regular price of $40. She focuses on tools and baby items because she says they are easy to sell. Right now, she is collecting items to sell at a garage sale to raise money for her church’s youth group to go to summer camp.
Some people online sell the items on apps like 5 Mile or Beg, Barter and Trade.
“They buy it in the store- big items,” said Lynn. “And they have it sold by the time they get out into the parking lot.”
How it works
- Download the Walmart app.
- Go to the clearance aisle of any Walmart store.
- Scan the bar code of products with the scanner in the app.
- Lynn says look up for items on the top shelves. The tags of those items are less likely to have been updated.
- End caps are also a good place to look. The Freebie Guy says end caps are usually where Walmart puts items it buys in bulk. They want to get them out when the season is over.
- Walmart marks items down every day, but The Freebie Guy says the biggest clearance markdowns happen in January (after Christmas) and in September (at the end of the summer season).
Both Lynn and The Freebie Guy have Walmart Clearance Facebook groups you can join. It’s where members post pictures and SKUs of items they found on hidden clearance. Others can then go find those same products at their nearest Walmart. You should know that prices differ from store to store. Lynn says it is common for her to find big price differences from one store to the next, and sometimes you won’t find anything at all.
Join Judy’s WalMart Clearance Finds Facebook group.
Join The Freebie Guy’s WalMart Clearance Shoppers Facebook group.
“Have fun with it,” said The Freebie Guy. “You won’t always find stuff. That’s just part of the game. But when you do, it makes those finds even sweeter.”
“You just have to scan, scan, scan, scan,” said Lynn.