There are a few stores that offer competitive pricing; one of the methods that they use to do this is to allow buyers to “Price Match.” In case you are unfamiliar with this term, it means you simply take the competitor’s flyer to the store at which you want to shop, and that store, if they offer a price match option, will then give you the same item for the competitor’s advertised price.

It seems like a pretty great thing, doesn’t it? So why shouldn’t we do this?

Well, the store that is best known for its price matching is Multi-conglomerate Wal-Mart. Now, it’s not to say that you should not shop at Wal-Mart because they do have some great deals, even more so now that many of them have expanded themselves into Wal-Mart SuperCenters. Still, the reason that maybe you should think twice about price matching there is that it gives Wal-Mart even more of a monopoly. It already has, and it severely hurts many local businesses, also known stores like Shoppers Drug Mart, London Drugs, Food Basics and FreshCo can’t compete with Wal-marts’s prices because they simply do not buy their stock in such volume.

There are 6200 Wal-Mart stores worldwide with suppliers around the globe and many in China.

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why one would choose not to shop there, to begin with, and these problems will only get worse with continued shopping taking away revenue from the competitors via price matching.

 

Firstly, Wal-Mart does not pay its employees well. If we continue to take business away from other local venues and begin instead to Walmart, that’s going to require more Wal-Marts’ to be built. This may seem like a good thing because jobs are created, but it’s not that black and white. The positions that are created are usually filled by those who have lost their jobs due to being undersold by this company.

If you do not like to be in crowds, if the thought of lots of people flocking to one place scares you if you’re embarrassed about what the person behind you in line will say when you throw down your stack of coupons for fear of being judged, maybe it’s better to avoid price matching altogether. Wal-Mart does offer price matching, but some staff are not appropriately trained and may send you to customer service.

And last but not least, even though there are many Wal-Mart locations; sometimes it’s not viable to visit them, and it’s easier to get to your neighbourhood shops, with the current price of gas you have to factor in if it is worth it to drive across the city to save a few cents.