Shopping Discussion

Walmart Ad Match ending October 15, 2020

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  • Jul 5th, 2021 11:21 am
Deal Addict
Mar 10, 2019
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Kfox wrote: You're missing out on big savings.
I bought 10 items today at No Frills, I price matched 7 of them. My bill was $22, savings from price matching was about $8. PMing saves me hundreds per year.
I recently had a $484 grocery order brought down to $261 through price matching at Walmart. I'll be sad to see this program go.
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Sep 13, 2007
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dollarsign wrote: I understand your point. I just shop differently than you.

I generally stop by a store after work. One day will be Metro, then Sobeys, then Zehrs, then NoFrills. I buy all I want at each store, then the week's over. That covers everything and every sale. Yes, with Covid, I'm shopping less...

Notice that I didn't include Freshco (scammers) and FoodBasics (watered down meat). Anybody shopping at Freshco, check your receipt. I stopped going to them because they were deliberately charging customers more. They put up displays at sale prices, but don't program their registers for the same prices. They exist to rip-off customers.
Doesn't Freshco comply with S.C.O.P.? https://settlement.org/ontario/daily-li ... tice-scop/
Sobey's, Empire's other banner does
lecale wrote: No I mean they will bring the member pricing scheme to No Frills.
I don't think No Frills will ever go all in on in-store PCO offers because Loblaw doesn't want to poach points collector customers from Loblaws and SDM
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Dec 26, 2014
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RCSS has a whole marketing program built around automatically matching competitor's prices (including FreshCo, at least in Winnipeg) so I would hope they wouldn't drop their own.

Save-On also has theirs of course but I'm not sure who they're competing against in Western Canada lol
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Mar 10, 2019
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Kfox wrote: To save time at the cash, before I go to the store I take screenshots of all the price matches on Flipp, then at cash I can quickly show the screenshots and avoid having to navigate through the Flipp app.

.
I don't even do that. I match it all online, and customer service e-mails me back confirming the prices. I haven't slowed down a single customer's in-store shopping experience by doing that. I can't understand why a consumer would want the program gone. Walmart dropping this program is only potentially a bad thing for the customer.
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computergeek541 wrote: I don't even do that. I match it all online, and customer service e-mails me back confirming the prices. I haven't slowed down a single customer's in-store shopping experience by doing that. I can't understand why a consumer would want the program gone. Walmart dropping this program is only potentially a bad thing for the customer.
I'm talking groceries
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Feb 1, 2006
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Ontario
Kfox wrote: Doesn't Freshco comply with S.C.O.P.? https://settlement.org/ontario/daily-li ... tice-scop/
Sobey's, Empire's other banner does


I don't think No Frills will ever go all in on in-store PCO offers because Loblaw doesn't want to poach points collector customers from Loblaws and SDM
Last time I went to Freshco they overcharged me on two items. When I pleaded SCOP and showed the sign in front of the cash, they pleaded Covid as an excuse.

I told them to remove the signs then. Finally got my two items for free. Not going back there. Jokers!
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Feb 1, 2006
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lecale wrote: Food Basics cuts their steaks and pork chops like they are deli meat. Good destination for goat and suet though.

Freshco aren't deliberately jacks they just have really bad IT and this goes back to the SAP debacle they orchestrated. You wouldn't believe the ordeal it was to buy 3 lbs of asparagus when they brought their self-checkouts in. They had a whole pile of asparagus codes in the system, every way I tried gave an error. I cried for help, it took 2 of us 10 minutes to run through all the possible ways to buy asparagus and find one that worked. We eat tons of asparagus but how can I go back there and face that again? Otherwise, everything you said is true. Please watch for random numbers.
I wonder if you might know why No Frills has some many price mistakes. I used to shop there quite a bit and more often than not I'd be overcharged on something, usually produce. It seems the sale prices weren't in their systems. They would consistently charge me more than the signs in the produce dept. said. It it was a whole song and dance to try to get them to honour the price never mind SCOP. So I stopped shopping there.

Maybe in issue with that particular No Frills? How are other No Frills with price accuracy, produce in particular?
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Sr. Member
Nov 28, 2013
531 posts
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Montr
This sucks. I always price matched through reebee for everything. Didn’t take long at all.

Their fruits usually aren’t the cheapest.

On my overall bill I would save about 30%

Well they knocked out target with their free shipping with no minimums, there aren’t many places we can go to buy food, clothes and electronics in one spot. Costco is the other but different pricing.
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Dec 19, 2010
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We are an extremely busy family and Walmart is our one-stop shop for convivence's sake. We do grocery pickup. meaning we place our order online. A good portion of our order is price matched every time, particularly on staples which are bound to be on sale somewhere. It results in some pretty major savings.

Total horseshit and I'll be glad to take business elsewhere.
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Jun 16, 2009
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dollarsign wrote: I really hope it is stopped (No offence to you OP).

Nothing worse than standing behind someone who suddenly pulls out a stack of flyers to price-match every item in their cart.

Good Riddance.

Give the business to the place that advertised the special instead! Stop inconveniencing everybody standing behind you...
I don't do much of the shopping, but my wife concurs with you. Someone pulls out a bunch of flyers in line and she's stuck behind them. Of course she's done it on occasion herself, lol

My problem with this is I might have done it occasionally for a more expensive product, like electronics, video games, etc., where I can walk in at 7am and grab it before work and before crowds. Plus it guarantees that I get my hands on it same day and with less hassle. Guess that choice for me is gone now.
c'mon get happy!
Deal Addict
Mar 4, 2014
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Whenever I price matched, I sorted my groceries and ensured I was organized to make it easy for the cashier. Usually the cashiers would be happy since it makes their job much easier. I can see how it slows down when people randomly pull out flyers and try to find an item while in line.

Edit: spelling
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Jun 13, 2019
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Looks like I missed doing this stuff.. I thought it was to be done at customer service after you purchase it.

I tried only once at Walmart to match the price for "Stanley Wet Dry Vacuum" with the other Walmart store, and the request was turned down saying we don't do PM with other own store only competitor stores.
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trigger0 wrote: Looks like I missed doing this stuff.. I thought it was to be done at customer service after you purchase it.

I tried only once at Walmart to match the price for "Stanley Wet Dry Vacuum" with the other Walmart store, and the request was turned down saying we don't do PM with other own store only competitor stores.
That's because the managers at each location has the power to put items on Clearance. That vacuum might not be hard to sell at the location you tried at, or was the last model at the cheaper location, or many other factors. That's a pretty typical Walmart policy.
c'mon get happy!
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Nov 15, 2008
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minimalist wrote: I wonder if you might know why No Frills has some many price mistakes. I used to shop there quite a bit and more often than not I'd be overcharged on something, usually produce. It seems the sale prices weren't in their systems. They would consistently charge me more than the signs in the produce dept. said. It it was a whole song and dance to try to get them to honour the price never mind SCOP. So I stopped shopping there.

Maybe in issue with that particular No Frills? How are other No Frills with price accuracy, produce in particular?
What you are saying was once true and real and I am not sure what it is like right now because I haven't been hitting the No Frills much these days. (I would go more but it is in an awkward location. Great store, creditable produce.)

The issue was come Thursday a scattered few promotional prices would not be activated when the clock hit midnight. For me it was produce too. They would catch the issues as the week progressed but if you hit them up on Thursday you were more likely to encounter situations where the sale prices were not activated yet. Unfortunately if you are shopping Thursday it usually means you are one of the people who really cares about best deals and prices. My No Frills knew the odd price didn't update correctly and were easy to deal with. They need to report the error back to Loblaw and Loblaw would fix it for everyone via SAP. While No Frills was waiting for the fix, they would deal with customers affected on a case by case basis.

Loblaw has an ERP system called SAP and that includes a database with product names, UPC numbers, inventory information, regular store prices, plus business logic, e.g., "put this on sale for $1.99 for 7 days starting Thursday, maximum 4 per customer and it's $2.49 if you want more than that." The business logic is the rules of engagement with the customer.

If you are at zehrs.ca all the product info you see there is from SAP. Same with nofrills.ca. Same with shoppersdrugmart.ca. They are all pulling data and rules from this monster SAP system.

When you use the PCO app, it is pulling information from SAP.

When you use the cashier or self checkout, the tills are pulling information from SAP.

Some stores have fancy new shelf labels that communicate wirelessly ... they display the current price, they pull that information from from SAP.

Loblaw is pretty darned good at pricing accuracy in general because they won with SAP. It is very, very, very complicated to set up SAP and get it to run. It takes years. People joke that SAP stands for "Stop All Production" because if you can't get SAP to run right for your company it will totally cripple the business. Target came to Canada, tried to set up SAP on a rush schedule, totally and abysmally failed. People have all sorts of complicated explanations for why Target Canada failed but it's simple math, Failure = Hubris + SAP. Proverbs 16:18 "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall." Target Canada was way too overconfident on the SAP thing. Empire (Sobeys) eventually implemented SAP but things did not go smoothly. A quick Google on these guys and SAP and you get keywords back like "screwed up," "plagued," and "meltdown." They just gave up at one point but they got back at it and tried again. Empire has SAP running now but Loblaws is the straight A student and Empire is a C average.

When something goes wrong it is a bug and customers are essentially submitting bug reports when they complain. Customer service fixes up the customer, but in the ideal world bugs go to the IT team who will fix them. Loblaws has SAP running robustly and if you find an issue their guys are right on it, patching things up. Then you have companies like Empire and Walmart that won't act on bugs you find because their IT guys are focused on the many other issues in their craptacular SAP implementations. It's like, "thanks for letting us know, we will put it on our list and handle it within a year." No, that's a lie, they don't thank you, you have to write satirical reviews on walmart.ca to explain the general f***ery around a given product but at least they approve your review. If you find a juicy bug at Walmart I assure you there is no channel that will listen but "submit a review" is like open mike night at the comedy club. You should go.

Now we are at a point where Walmart and Empire still make big stupid boners, while a bug with Loblaws generally involves a lot of algebra, like, "listen you bastards I have 200 pts per $1 on the product, 2,000 per $10 on the category, I bought 5 for $1.99 each and the rounding rules say $9.95 counts as $10, I am missing pts and this is an outrage!" We are fighting about the details.

Loblaw has clearly separated themselves from the rest of the pack now. They are beyond just making things work, they are using SAP to strategize. Loblaw are a pack of social justice warriors and their PCO points program redirects profits made from people who don't care how much things cost (they want quality and convenience) to people who are struggling to make ends meet and playing the PCO points game to get ahead. I like IT, I like social justice, I like these guys. I think Galen Weston Jr. is going to become one of my new teen idols. (We will find a picture of him in a magazine, frame it and put it in the hall of fame over the toilet. We like people to have something to look at while they do their business which is why this is an appropriate place for a gallery of businesspeople.)

My message is become aware of these people. Loblaw is doing really interesting things. They are highly competent. They are going to win this so go visit.
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Mar 10, 2019
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Kfox wrote: I'm talking groceries
So am I. I match online.
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Jan 29, 2017
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lecale wrote: Loblaw is pretty happy to give you the same kinds of offers at any banner. A big one is 1,000 pts on 4 L milk. SDM always offered points on milk, it was the hottest deal they had. Now No Frills offers 1,000 pts on milk regularly and Loblaws/Zehrs does infrequently (but still does so it counts).

No Frills is in fact all in on in-store PCO offers for milk.
Milk has a mandated floor price so these pts offers are a nice loophole to attract customers.
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Sep 24, 2007
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computergeek541 wrote: I recently had a $484 grocery order brought down to $261 through price matching at Walmart. I'll be sad to see this program go.
...and I’m sure the people waiting in line after you were ecstatic!
Jr. Member
Aug 22, 2016
105 posts
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in and out of a vici…
dollarsign wrote: Actually, just last week. It wasn't Walmart though.

I popped into NoFrills to grab a bag of milk on the way home. Went to the express lane where there was just one woman in line. She pulls out 4 flyers for the 4 products she's buying. At this NoFrills (maybe all? I don't know), manager approval was needed. After the manager finally gets there, some disagreement erupts about how house brands aren't equivalent.

My 30 second shop to buy milk turned into 5 minutes while this woman argued the merits of store brands.

My experience at No Frills 775 (1150 Victoria Park Ave., East York, Ontario): no price matching allowed in the express lane. (Caveat: policy may vary under COVID-19 protocols.)

Also: when the competitor price is below the No Frills (? Loblaw) cost, a manager's approval/authorization may be required. This has happened to me a few times, including on Wednesday when they matched the Metro price (front page of September 10-16 flyer) of CA$3.99/1-L bottle of Mastro Extra Virgin Olive Oil which No Frills was selling for CA$8.97 (!):

https://www.nofrills.ca/Food/Pantry/Oil ... 0077972_EA
Last edited by DrewDamage on Sep 21st, 2020 12:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Deal Expert
Jun 30, 2006
21132 posts
9788 upvotes
Toronto
Walmart loses my business now. Their produce was crap, only reason to go was for price matching. Their prices are too high now, better off at No Frills or FreshCo now.
Deal Expert
Jun 30, 2006
21132 posts
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Toronto
Delays at the checkout because they have only 3 checkouts open to begin with. Open all checkouts.

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