Jill Cataldo

As I touched on in Monday's Deals of the Week post, it's been a great week for clearance toy and clothes shopping all over town! Hope you've all been out bargain-hunting and enjoying your finds!

As I discuss at great length in my Super-Couponing classes, both January and late July/early August are when many stores slash prices on both toys and clothing. On Sunday, we picked up some clothes at the Old Navy 50% off clearance summer sale. Not all Old Navy stores dropped (it's not quite like the January Old Navy clearance where every single store drops at the same time) but Algonquin's clearance was running, and my husband got some nice work shirts in the under-$3 range, as well as a $1.97 shirts for our boys. Many readers posted reports of $2 swim trunks and children's clothes too.

I just got back from a shopping trip to the Algonquin Meijer, where two aisles of toys are marked up to 75% off! An employee was in the process of retagging everything while I was there, so they've just dropped. (I don't know if all Meijers are dropping today, but it may be worth a call.)

Here's how corporate determines which toys to drop. The employee I spoke with said that any toys that were brought in for Christmas and did not sell are currently at 50% off IF there are 5 or more of the same toy in inventory. If there are less than 5, the prices are dropping to 75% off.

How do you know what coupons a particular store takes? The answer lies in the store's coupon policy. Coupon policies are great tools for shoppers to know exactly where stores stand on what kinds of coupons they will accept.

Here are links to the most current coupon policies available at the time of this writing.

Jewel-Osco

Dominick's

Meijer

Hilander / Kroger