This holiday season, the hottest trend among retailers isn’t found on a store shelf. It’s taking place at the cash register.
Major retailers, from Best Buy to Toys R Us, are promising to match their competitors’ prices. Generally customers just need to bring in an advertisement or printout to prove that the same item is available elsewhere at a lower price.
In some cases, shoppers can come back with a receipt and get a refund for the difference if the price of an item they bought fell.
Best Buy, Target, Walmart and Sears offer price matching to customers all year.
But what’s different now is that Best Buy and Target are matching online retailers such as Amazon. com for the first time.
That’s a big deal, since online prices tend to be lower than those at stores.
Shoppers will be able to save some extra money, but they’re going to have to read a lot of fine print to do so.
“Price matching sounds good, but there are so many exclusions, it sometimes isn’t as good as it sounds,” says Edgar Dworsky, the founder of ConsumerWorld.org, which tracks deals for shoppers.
For instance, Target limits the number of online retailers that it will price match against to just five. Best Buy has selected 20, but only matched online prices from Nov. 1 to Nov. 17 and will start again from Nov. 27 to Dec. 24.
Toys R Us is offering price matching for the first time and will only match prices that customers find in other brick-and-mortar stores. Walmart also matches against in-store prices.
Learn more about retailers’ policies this season on A11.
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