Is couponing [1] apart of your dollar plan [2]? It’s an integral part of ours. Walmart has a new price match policy [3] that is bound to turn some heads, especially here in Houston where Kroger has recently stopped doubling and tripling coupons and many stores are no longer accepting coupons printed from home [4].
In a nutshell, you can now price match from competitor’s ads at Wal-Mart cash registers without bringing in the ads themselves. You just tell the register clerk what the price is that you saw at a competitor, and they will ring it through. Have I grabbed your attention yet?
What Walmart Will Match
Let’s begin with what the Walmart price match program will accept before we go into all of the fine print jargon. Walmart will accept price matching from the following:
- Specific item with a specific price: This covers most items in the sales ads you get each week.
- Buy One Get One Free Ads: These have to specify an actual price though.
- Preferred Shopping Card prices for a specific item: You see these in Kroger, Randall’s/Safeway and other ads for stores who have loyalty cards.
- Fresh produce and fresh meat offered in the same unit type: You must match the product lb. for lb. or ‘each for each’ when it comes to produce and meat.
The advertised price must be from a local competitor’s advertised price for that particular week, and the item purchased must be identical to the ad in size, quantity, brand, flavor, color, and anything else it might need to match.
What Walmart Won’t Match
If you pull up the webpage with Walmart’s ad match policy [3], you’ll see that actually there is not a lot of red tape. Here is what will not be price matched:
- Items without a price in the ad: You see this most often with Buy One Get One Free sales.
- Items that require a second purchase to get the ad price: Buying something of another product in order to get a discount on this product.
- Items that don’t have a price and require a purchase to get them for free: You see this at a store called H-E-B as well as Kroger where if you purchase one item you get several items for free.
- Items that require a purchase to get a competitor’s gift card: Most notably you find these deals at Target where if you buy two of “x†product you will get a $5 Target gift card.
- Going out of business or closeout prices.
- Percentage off sales with no price specified: This is for items that are 40% off, but there is not a specific price.
- Competitors’ private label price promotions: You cannot use pricing for Randall’s/Safeway’s private label Lucerne in order to receive Walmart’s private label for the same price.
- Internet pricing: You won’t be able to match Amazon prices [5].
- Misprinted ad prices of other retailers: Sometimes mistakes happen in the printing of ads, though I don’t know how you or the cash register person would know this.
A Few Clarifications
I had a few questions about the above information, and gave it a try for myself a few weeks ago at Walmart. Some of my questions were which stores are considered “local competitors†(i.e. can I use drugstore and dollar store grocery sales ads?) and whether or not H-E-B’s 5 items for $5 would yield me a cantaloupe for $1. During my experiment I found that I was able to price match using the CVS ad. I snagged a great deal on some 24-pk. Cokes for the refrigerator. CVS had them on sale that week for 5/$13, and this was not in conjunction with ExtraCare Bucks [6]. $2.60 per 24 pack is a great price! Unfortunately I did not find anything in the Family Dollar ad to price match in order to determine if I could use it. Also, cantaloupes at Walmart were also priced at $1, so I could not test that scenario out either.
Stack Walmart’s Coupon Policy for Extra Savings
Walmart also has updated its coupon policy [7] recently and accepts competitor’s coupons (with several exceptions), competitor’s checkout coupons (“catalinasâ€) that are printed out from the cash register at other stores (with several exceptions), and printable coupons [4] (with a few exceptions).
I am personally excited about the last one because while I don’t shop at Walmart often, the last time I did I tried to use a printable coupon they would not allow it.  Another notable change is the following, “If coupon value exceeds the price of the item, the excess may be given to the customer as cash or applied toward the basket purchaseâ€. This is in addition to all of the other ‘normal’ coupons accepted.
For my trip last weekend I found a Family Dollar coupon for $0.50 off of Special K Cereal, and was able to use that with Walmart’s new coupon policy. Pretty exciting!
My total savings from the price matching and the coupons I used was $14.42. It may not sound like much, but I only had to make a trip to one store. In my book, that’s doing pretty well!
Have you tried out Walmart’s new price match guaranteed and/or coupon policy? How did it go?