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Secrets to finding After-Christmas or Clearance home theater bargains
By Robert Silva, About.com
After-Christmas, Year-End, and Clearance sales are a great time get some good deals, but you can also end up with a purchase disaster. This is where the consumer needs to shop smart. Don’t just grab the newspaper AD and run down to your local consumer electronics retailer without arming yourself with useful knowledge and tools to get the most from your dollar.
This is the time of year when retailers try to do several things: Sell any overstock still taking up too much shelf space, sell items that are soon to be on the clearance list, turnaround gift returns/exchanges (both opened and unopened), sell through old display models, and sell old product that has been to service.
Overstock Items
This is where the consumer can get a good deal, depending on how desperate the store is to clear out shelf space. Overstock items are usually those loss leaders, such as those famous $30 DVD players, $199 27-inch Televisions, and $249 budget home theater packages that are still new and in sealed boxes. Here you know that they haven’t been opened, returned, or used.
These may not always be the best known name-brand models, but can be a good value, as long as they are available. These items are usually the first to go in an after-Christmas sale, so get to the store early the day after Christmas for the best chance of grabbing one of these products.
Soon-To-Be-Clearance Items
This is my favorite bargain-sale category. Here is the “scoop”. Every January, the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is held in Las Vegas in which all the consumer electronics manufacturers from around the World unveil their products for the coming year.
These products start to hit shelves in February and continue into the Spring and Summer. Needless to say, buyers from the big consumer electronics retail chains to small regional and home town independents flock to this show in order to place orders for new products.
However, in order to beat the competition in placing these products on store shelves, the retailers must clear out current products targeted for replacement from their warehouses and stores as quickly as possible.
This is where the consumer can benefit. If a retailer made the “mistake” of over-estimating the demand for a particular AV receiver, for instance, and has lots of stock left by February, it will be more difficult to move the older model as its competitors, who didn’t over order stock on the old model, sell the newer model when it arrives.
So, in order to “get rid” of the currently overstocked model, retailers will often place notice of a significant price drop on the older model.
However, many consumers don’t react well to the word “clearance”, which gives the connotation that the product may be, in some way, inferior to a newer model (that may or may not be the case in reality). Therefore, the promotion for the old model often carries an AD notice of a “Price Drop”, “Instant Discount”, or “Instant Rebate” or even “Special Purchase”. Also, an additional indicator of a clearance item is in the fine print; check for the phrases “While Supplies Last” and/or “No Rainchecks”.
If you are bargain hunting, this could end up being a great deal. The retailer gets rid of a product that will soon be discontinued and the consumer gets a great price.
If you don’t need the latest and greatest, and the “clearance” product has everything you really need, this could work out well. The key is to make sure the product meets your needs by checking out the features ahead of time on either the manufacturer’s or store’s website, if possible.
