Raiding Clearance Aisles and Reselling on Amazon for Profit

I suspect what they would actually do is calculate if shipping them back to their own warehouse and selling the rest of the inventory online would make sense. But I think what they've really done is tighten up their own logistics (and marketing periods) to avoid shipping too many extra items out to the stores in the first place. I remember clearance sales being much bigger back in the day.

Today's clearance is probably still being sold above the incremental production cost, with a rebate from the manufacturer since it wasn't sold at full price. It doesn't matter that they're technically leaving some money on the table - their core business is moving "fresh" stuff at higher markups.

(Also, that Monopoly thing was a different type of arbitrage than Brickseek)