Effective July 28, 2025, Target will be ending their years-long price match policy whereby customers can request a price adjustment to match the lower price of other retailers (Amazon, Walmart). Going forward, Target will only price match between their own website and store, but not against other retailers.
This is being reported today in various media outlets, and hat tip to Jawwaad127 for an image of the notice at Target:
Hat tip to reader Celia
Snore. Every store already has same-store price match. It’s called return and rebuy. Can do it probably faster than trying to convince the employee to do the price match whether they have a policy or not.
Refund with receipt. Go back to shelf, get item at new lower price and buy at regular checkout. EZ.
I think one time I did a price match at Target. The manager gave me a hard time as she could not even understand the terms of their own price match. This was years ago and I was matching (I think) an office supply store. At that time the written policy stated they will match amazon, walmart i hithink best buy or other local retailers with proof. The manager kept sayign to me it was only the three named retailers. Everntually I got it but I never bothered again. That was not the first time a manager in a big box store could not undertsand their own program as written.
i thought people were just saying saying ‘who gave this feedback?’ because target recently said they did something based off of their customers, but no, they actually had the gall to say that their customers asked to stop price matching other companies. target is so trash
Sucks. I saved 30$ on an iPad purchase few years ago with price match.
All companies are going to shit all at once It seems
They could use this savings to stock & pedal even more DEI & rainbow stuff.
Every year I see these stuff on display for a month & pretty much the entire inventory for pennies on the dollar in clearance.
@aquac as a former Target employee, I think you fail to understand just how much stuff in general a Target throws away. There is a mandate to clear shelves for the next season/holiday of stuff. I’ve seen dumpsters worth of Christmas items just being dumped. It’s quite sad and wasteful.
I never knew that. Thats amazing. I thought that stuff went to liquidators. Thats just business I guess.
If there is one thing they could do it would be make sure Target.com and store pricing is the same. Target.com tries to compete with Walmart/Amazon but in-store its different. There were times I had to price match a ton of items with Target.com that the cashier hated me.
Last time I tried this, the match was deemed to be not the same item. The Amazon item had a different UPC than the instore item even though they were the same item. This was an OXO cocktail shaker – not some high end electronic. In this case the difference was small – about $3 and I could live with paying the slightly higher price.
That’s one of the reasons why manufacturers like Western Digital repackages everything for different retailers so those can claim it’s not the same.
Hated when they started doing that crap. Just ordered from Target, market on sale for $60, and the next day saw a very similar item on Amazon for $35. Different product codes. Both items arrived with identical packaging and UPC codes. Got 90 days to return.
Target is usually the lowest price around me for the basics over Safeway, Walgreens, even Walmart. I like that the policy was there but not sure how much practice it really got.
It was probably someone with who hated the confrontational aspect of requesting a price match. (Target deliberately misunderstood the comment from someone who wanted to talk to a machine.) It wasn’t me- I stopped shopping at Target because their pricing shenanigans. Price vary between Targets in my county. And it’s not like one store is the cheap one. The high and low prices vary across prices and stores. It is the blatant trickery that was offensive. Oh, and the prices on the shelf are frequently lower than the price at the register. The mistake never benefits the shopper, just Target.
Clearly missed the target
I think the main reason here is to protect against giving double discounts.If you go to store and price match a product, their Target circle discount will apply on top of that.
They fixed that recently by not offering extra discount, but it does pop up occasionally. Now they just want to close the loop hole entirely by not price matching.
Target made 29 billion in profits in 2024.
You’re telling me they couldn’t find 2 engineers and ask them to write if (priceMatch) targetCircleDiscounts=False ?
No, this is a business decision made by some MBA.
Target made $4 billion in net income in 2024. Nicely profitable but no where near $29 billion.
“Target made 29 billion in profits in 2024.”
No it didn’t. Not even close to $29B.
Look like they did. Target reported an annual gross profit of $29.584 billion for 2024, a 10.33% increase from 2023. Target’s Net Earnings for the full year 2024 were $4.091 billion. This represents a decrease of 1.1% compared to fiscal year 2023, which reported $4.138 billion in net earnings.
Gross Profit is totally different from net income. Gross profit is sales price less cost of goods sold. There are lots of other expenses (salaries, rent, benefits, income taxes, etc…) that are not included in gross profit but are a cost of business.
Agreed, just pointing out where the OP got the number.
This change was made at a lot of retailers years ago. Surprised it took Target this long.
Whatever loop they closed has also impacted my ability to get legit circle rewards. My recent purchases aren’t triggering circle rewards when I quality. I have to spend time chatting with CS to get my credit. All this does is steer my away from Target.
Highly doubt that
https://www.statista.com/statistics/256008/net-earnings-of-target-in-north-america/
They made 106.57B revenue but only about 4B profits. Obviously that is kind of low and probably why they want to cut costs. Not saying this is right or not but they decided to cut the costs on Price Match. Personally I’m not sure how much PM actually costs them, it is likely the time their employees spend on this cost more than the price differences. Also removing PM benefit can potentially cost them some sales if competitors keep PM. We shall see.