Walmart's price-matching policy: gimmick or real deal?

HOUSTON

Walmart just launched a new campaign to re establish its price match policy welcoming competitors ads every day. For one dad, it translates to a huge savings and no coupon clipping is required.

Paul Ivanovsky is in charge of the Walmart shopping trips for his family.

His wife, Tiffany, is in charge of clipping coupons. The family has seven kids ages 13 years old to 8 months, so they have keep a tight budget it's why Ivanovsky price matched groceries at Walmart.

"I'm only making one trip to one place, save myself time and it really works great for us," he said.

This is the way price matching works: You simply take a competitors ad from stores like Kroger or CVS and price match. Ivanovsky shows us how.

At Walmart the price of a 12-pack of coke is $4.28 but at CVS, it's three packs for $10. That makes each 12-pack $3.33.

"So we are saving 90 cents, right around there, per one, so yeah so it's a good deal," he said.

At Walmart you can also price match produce.

"So here we have grapes on sale at HEB this week for 98 cents a pound. Here they are $1.78," he said.

That's almost half off.

Ivanovsky also price matches chicken and beef.

"You can price match steak, isn't that great?" he said. "HEB has boneless beef rib-eyes on steak for sale for $5.97 a pound, I mean that's a great price," he said.

At Walmart, it's $8.68 a pound.

"So we are going to be saving roughly $2.70 a pound," Ivanovsky said.

We also price match prunes; at Walmart, they are $3.98 but the CVS ad has them on sale for $1.88 -- more than half off. In the paper aisle, we found a 8-pack of Bounty paper towels for $8.87 so we'll price match that for $6.99.

That's when a shopper noticed Ivanovsky's price-matching strategy and asked how she can do the same.

"Tell them at the register you want to price match this and they will do it for $6.99 instead of $8.87," he told the shopper. "Oh I better carry one of those every time I shop," she said.

At the checkout, Ivanovsky says it helps to have your ads ready to show the cashier, but Walmart's policy doesn't require it; still Ivanovsky assists

At checkout, his total price on groceries by price matching is $41.05.

Then we checked out again without price matching any items and our total came out to $72.40.

"So we save 42 percent just by price matching and we only price-matched two stores," Ivanovsky said. Again we saved 42 percent, which is $31.35 cents! The trip took about an extra five minutes to price match at the register.

Go to Ivanovsky 's blog http://www.iheartthemart.com/ for more information.