The Magic of Price-Matching

You may not have noticed the fine print at the bottom of the screen during the latest Walmart TV commercials. If you have, you know that it states something along the lines that Walmart will match the price of similar items available at competing stores.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you are shopping at one of the Super Walmart locations (the ones with the grocery stores inside) and you know that a food items is cheaper at another local grocery store, Walmart will match that price.

There are no locally-owned grocery stores in the town where I live. They are all part of a national grocery chain, so there is a lot of competition between the food stores in our area. As a result, food prices are already a bit lower where I live than in other parts of the country.

This past weekend, my wife and I combed through the local grocery store circulars, made note of the prices of the items we needed to buy, and headed for Walmart. We hit the meat isle first. My wife had a spreadsheet of how much various cuts of beef, chicken and pork sold for per-pound at other grocery stores in the area. She grabbed the similar cuts at Walmart (which happened to be more expensive). The real magic happened at the check-out counter.

The clerk matched the prices of all of the meats, produce and other grocery items to the prices at the other area grocery stores. We probably saved about $50 total on our grocery bill, just through price-matching alone.

Why is this a big deal? It saved us the time, trouble, effort and gas which would have been required to drive to three other grocery stores to get the same prices. We still visited a couple of other stores which had the items Walmart didn't offer, or to take advantage of double-coupons. All told, we got about $400 worth of groceries for $300 through price-matching, shopping around, and double-coupons. Who couldn't use an extra $100 in their pocket these days?

It required some pre-planning on our part, but an hour's worth of pre-planning saved us about $100 and resulted in more food on the table at home. Get inventive, take advantage of price-matching, and you will be amazed at how much you can save!