Staples Canada Clearance: Tech, Ink, and Office Markdowns

Staples Canada's clearance is mostly laptops, monitors, and discontinued ink, at one national price. Where to find it, and what to do when your store is sold out.

Staples Canada's clearance is bigger than its in-store signage suggests. The online Clearance Centre held roughly 2,100 items when ShelfAware started tracking it, and most of it isn't pens and paper. It's last year's laptops and monitors, discontinued electronics, office furniture, and ink for printers Staples no longer sells.

One price at every store, different stock at each

Staples prices nationally, so a clearance laptop costs the same on either coast. The thing that varies is stock. One store might have three, the next none at all. Staples publishes stock for each store alongside the clearance listing, and ShelfAware reads it for all of its roughly 270 Canadian stores in the same pass, so the deals page can tell you which nearby locations actually have the item.

Since the price never changes between stores, there's no point driving further for a better one. Go to the closest store that has it.

Ink and toner: the quiet category

When a printer model is phased out, its cartridges are discontinued with it, and they go to clearance. In the store, those markdowns stay on the shelf next to current stock instead of being pulled into a clearance section, so they're easy to walk past.

If you own an older printer, this matters more than a sale price. Once discontinued ink sells through, Staples won't restock it. Search the cartridge for your printer and set an alert, and you'll hear about the markdown before the shelf empties.

Last year's laptops are this year's clearance

Laptops, tablets, and monitors get cleared when the manufacturer ships the next model, often while the outgoing one is still perfectly good for most people. Those markdowns tend to be real, since the store needs the space and won't order more. Still, check the price history before trusting a "was" price. If the laptop was already at the clearance price a month ago, the tag is describing a discount you could have had then too.

Sold out at your store? Check shipping

A clearance item can be gone from every store near you and still be available to ship. ShelfAware checks that separately, against your postal code, using the same stock figure Staples uses before its own site shows an item as out of stock. A discontinued item that's truly gone comes back as zero there too, so you won't be sent chasing a listing that can't be filled.

Start with today's Staples clearance, or search a specific item to see its price history, stock at nearby stores, and whether it can still ship. The Staples page has the rest.