Most of the things I bother with price matching on will require some sort of human interaction in a store to get anyway. Large items, expensive items, etc.
It typically takes me less than a minute to validate price on an item like this while in-store and inform the person I'm talking to. Response time from there can vary a bit but at my local MicroCenter it takes them less than a minute to do a quick confirmation of their own, then mark and sign a sticker. That's it. But nobody at any store has ever asked me to beg or made it feel like it's begging to ask for a price-match.
Once, those 2 minutes saved me $800 when I was buying two monitors. The $999 MSRP to knocked down to $599 due to a sale at a competitor. There was no negotiation. The sales guy just blinked in surprise for a second when confirming it and said "Yeah, we can match that." To be fair, for this purchase I knew their price and their competitor's before showing up because I checked out their inventory on their website.
Yes, it would have been cool if they tracked their competitors' prices and automatically updated their own price (and had employees adjust the corresponding in-store price tags at every store) each time any of their competitors had a sale or lower price.
Frankly, though, that burden is not on the store selling the product. They probably would go out of business doing something like that without a huge competitor-matching supply chain behind them that can support universally thin margins. As a consumer, if I want the best possible price then I need to be willing to waggle my thumb across my phone at least a little bit to look for it.
Totally. I do it too and also have saved money by price matching things. The backwards thing is that besides all the technical limitation of price tracking that was already discussed in this thread, the ultimate motivation behind strategies like price matching or rebates, is that they give the customer the feeling that they are beating the system, but really is just an extra psychological incentive to get you to purchase something.
It typically takes me less than a minute to validate price on an item like this while in-store and inform the person I'm talking to. Response time from there can vary a bit but at my local MicroCenter it takes them less than a minute to do a quick confirmation of their own, then mark and sign a sticker. That's it. But nobody at any store has ever asked me to beg or made it feel like it's begging to ask for a price-match.
Once, those 2 minutes saved me $800 when I was buying two monitors. The $999 MSRP to knocked down to $599 due to a sale at a competitor. There was no negotiation. The sales guy just blinked in surprise for a second when confirming it and said "Yeah, we can match that." To be fair, for this purchase I knew their price and their competitor's before showing up because I checked out their inventory on their website.
Yes, it would have been cool if they tracked their competitors' prices and automatically updated their own price (and had employees adjust the corresponding in-store price tags at every store) each time any of their competitors had a sale or lower price.
Frankly, though, that burden is not on the store selling the product. They probably would go out of business doing something like that without a huge competitor-matching supply chain behind them that can support universally thin margins. As a consumer, if I want the best possible price then I need to be willing to waggle my thumb across my phone at least a little bit to look for it.