Save time by price comping

When you have small children like I do, you find that time is a commodity that you never have enough of. When you start doing couponing in earnest, you might find you have less time then before. Even with coupon blogs doing the hard work for you on coupon match-ups every week, it doesn’t help you when you realize that you have to hit four stores in one day to save all the money you want to save. A way to get around a lot of this running around is to “price comp.”

Price comping is where a store will match a competitor’s ad on prices, to try and keep as much of your business in their store as possible (instead of shopping at the competition). Price comps are usually done through the customer service desk, but in some cases can be done when you go through your regular register line.

Always go in armed with the full competitor’s ad to show to your cashier or customer service associate when you are checking out so they can’t reject the price comp.

There are currently two stores that I know of that do price comping. One is Target and the other is Wal-Mart. Two months ago I would immediately have said that Target is your best bet to do price comping because you could stack Target and manufacturer coupons to get the best possible deal after doing a price comp. But, Target has recently changed its coupon policies on price comping so it is pretty much impossible to use a Target and manufacturer coupon on any price comp and they will not price comp a door buster sale.

Between all those factors, Target has pretty much prevented anyone wanting to price comp there.

If you are pressed for time and still want to save money, I’d recommend price comping at Wal-Mart. Go in armed with your store ad and they’ll price comp right at the cash registers (if problems develop you might have to go to customer service, but this is rare).

By Wal-Mart’s own words, they will price comp any competitor’s ad (they will not do in-ad coupon deals, though, so keep that in mind), doorbuster sale or no, so if you don’t want to have to run into Best Buy to get that awesome deal on a Blu-Ray disc, you could get the same deal by price comping at Wal-Mart. And since they are Super Center stores (compared to Target), they will match prices on things like bananas, saving you even more time.

Just in case you run into a cashier who doesn’t know what they are doing, I recommend always going into a store armed with the companies policies on price comping and coupon policies. These are readily found online through various sources.

Erika Buswell runs a blog dedicated to coupons and deals in Alaska (alaskanbargainhunter.blogspot.com) and lives in Palmer with her husband and two children.