Penny hunting glossary
The vocabulary you will run into in community posts and on shelf tags, in plain English. If you are new, read the guide first and use this as a reference.
Penny item
A product whose price in the store system has dropped to $0.01. It is not a sale. It is an instruction to staff to take the item off the sales floor. What hunters find are the units that instruction missed.
Markdown ladder
The sequence of price cuts an item steps through before it reaches a penny. Each rung is triggered by how long the item has been in clearance rather than by a date on a calendar, which is why two stores can be on different rungs for the same product.
Pull list
The internal list of items staff are told to remove from the floor. A penny find is a line on somebody's pull list that has not been worked yet. This is why the same SKU can be gone at one store and sitting on the shelf at the next.
MET
Merchandising Execution Team. The crew that resets bays, changes signage and works markdowns. They put up the new clearance tags and they work the pull list, often on the same visit, which is why hunters go at opening on days the crew is in.
Tag date
The date printed on a clearance tag. It matters more than the price ending. An older tag date means the item has been sitting in clearance longer and is further down the ladder.
WAS price
The original price printed on the clearance tag. The gap between the WAS price and the current price tells you roughly how far down the ladder an item has travelled.
Price ending decoder
The old habit of reading the cents digits to guess the clearance stage, for example .06 then .04 then .03 then .02 then .01. It is no longer reliable. Read the tag date and the WAS gap instead.
Store SKU
The ten-digit number on the shelf tag, usually written in groups like 1004-552-787. It is what identifies a product inside the store system and what you need to look anything up. It is not the same as the barcode.
UPC
The barcode number on the package itself. Receipts print the UPC rather than the store SKU, which is why a receipt and a shelf tag can show two completely different numbers for the same product.
Internet number
The identifier homedepot.com uses in its product URLs. Useful for finding the official listing and product photo, useless inside the store.
YMMV
Your mileage may vary. Shorthand acknowledging that penny status is decided store by store, so a confirmed find somewhere else is a lead and not a promise.
Overhead
The racking above the shelves. Stock gets stored there when a bay is full, and it is the single most common place a pennied item survives a pull, because nobody looks up.
Endcap
The display at the end of an aisle. Many stores have phased out a dedicated clearance endcap, so clearance now often sits in the item's normal bay instead.
Delisted
When a product disappears from homedepot.com entirely. It often happens shortly after an item finishes its markdown run, so a listing that has vanished or shows no price is a signal in its own right.
Self checkout
Where hunters scan, because the register is the only place the true system price appears. The shelf tag can be weeks out of date.