To avoid being undersold by their competitors, nearly all big box retailers adopt a price matching policy of some kind. It helps keep customers coming back to your business if they can get the same price as anywhere else. I think it’s a good retail practice. However, I’ve worked for several years in retail, and it always surprises me how often customers will use a price matching policy for a savings of a few pennies.

I once had a customer who claimed a competitor across the street was selling a video game for less than we did but they did not have a flyer I could use to verify the price. I checked their company website and found that the competitor did not list products or prices – only locations and contact numbers. Without verification I could not match. The customer left the store and came back a short time later with a price tag. They had gone across the street and secretly smuggled out a price tag for the game in question. The difference in price? Two cents. However, at the time we had a price beat policy, and to beat the price we discounted an additional ten percent of the difference. And the customer stated they indeed wanted the additional ten percent of the difference: 0.2 cents. I discounted the game by three cents. My favourite story however, comes from a co-worker of mine. A customer had purchased a phone and found it cheaper elsewhere. They came by the store, stood in line for about fifteen minutes and when they got to the counter they asked us to match a competitor who was selling the phone for ten cents cheaper. Rather than spending the five to ten minutes doing all the proper paper work for the price adjustment, my co-worker found it easier to pull a dime out from their own pocket and handed it to the customer.

I understand why a customer would want us to match a competitor price when there’s a substantial savings. And strangely enough, although matching such prices usually means that we lose money rather than make it, I’ll happily do it because I want to do right by a customer. I wince when I ring in the sale but there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m doing the right thing. It’s the inconsequential price beating that bothers me: the pennies and nickels and dimes. Yet, there are customers that go through such trouble: waiting in line, scouring flyers, arguing the fine print of policy terms, for nothing more than pocket change. Don’t people value their time more than that? For the difference of a few cents why bother? I’d rather they buy it elsewhere than come to my store and waste my time.