Have you ever noticed how toilet paper comes in about 10,000 different shapes and sizes of packaging? How about power tools? Ever tried to buy a Dewalt drill? You have about a gagillion different options to choose from. Usually, the stores that offer products with this wide variety of selection are the same ones that claim they offer price matching. Here’s why I think that’s a joke.

You’ve got to get the product code exactly right.

If the codes don’t match, the company won’t price match. Plain and simple. Easy enough then… once you find a cheaper price, all you need to do is find the product with the exact same code at the store you want to buy from… right?

Wrong, motherf***er.

You might try to find the product at the price-matching store… and you might even find the same product. Except it’s named differently, and the product code is one digit off from what you were looking for.

“Nope, sorry, we can’t price match that, not the same product,” you’re told.

And that, my friends, is the smoke-and-mirror game played by big box stores who claim to offer price matching. Sure, you might find an insignificant item where you can actually get a discount. But the big-ticket ones? The 60-pack of toilet paper, or the power tools, or the appliance you had your eye on?

Unless you can catch one of these companies making a mistake, you don’t stand a chance at getting them to price match any of those. And if you do, you’ll be the last one to make it happen.

More and more, stores are offering proprietary brands.

Take Canadian Tire’s Mastercraft brand. Or Lowe’s Kobalt brand. Or Home Depot’s Hampton Bay. You can find proprietary brands at almost every big box store you can imagine. And guess what? Because proprietary brands are unique to the store that carries them, they never have to worry about price matching.

I’ve seen prop-brand products take over more and more shelving space over the years, and it makes sense from a business perspective: they tend to be higher-margin items that are safe from price-matching. But from a consumer perspective, we tend to get the short end of the stick.

Wrapping it Up

Is it really worth it to price match? Ultimately it depends, but I’ve found it to be a waste of time personally. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve run up against the shell game I outlined above. It’s a big reason I try and support small businesses when I get the chance. They’re a lot less likely to engage in crap like that… and you almost always get better service to go along with it.

Do you pay slightly higher prices? Sometimes… but at least they’re not pretending to offer something that’s really just a pipe dream, right?