No More Canada-Wide Price Matching at Walmart :(

Last November somebody in a group I'm in posted a list of updated Ad Match policies for Walmart stores in Canada. I think it was meant for employees only, which is why I'm only going to post a little snippet of it. Most pertinent to note was the following change:

That's right, no more Canada-wide price matching! :(

I've noticed a huge change in my shopping experience at Walmart already. Over the Christmas holidays cashiers picked apart my deals from the smaller, less-known Canadian grocery stores. At the time I thought maybe the craziness of the holidays was getting to everyone and they just didn't want to be bothered.

In the past I have received many complements from customers and cashiers alike for my price-matching 'system' of writing out all the sales on individual post-it notes and sticking them to the items for the cashier to read as they scan each item in. Cashiers have thanked me, customers have taken photos - "What a clever idea!" was the general consensus. :)

Well, today I've been told that I needn't bother with that anymore. All items to be price-matched now require for me to show them the flyer. Luckily, I've always carried digital copies of the flyers on my iPod to back up my post-it notes! Usually they'll check a few and have been fine once they saw that these sales were valid. But now they demand to see a flyer for each and every item I'm price-matching. Way to slow down the whole check out process to a crawl!

I'm happy I was able to experience the wonders of price-matching for the few months that I got into it. Many small local stores offered amazing deals for those of us that were lucky enough to stumble across them. Gateway Meat Market in Nova Scotia had amazing deals on produce. As well as Fruiticana in Alberta and BC, and Bonanza Lalumière and Supermarché PA in Québec. All off-limits to me now.

This is definitely going to change my grocery shopping experience.