The supermarket’s promise to keep prices in line with rival stores will end next month after eight years. But will you miss price guarantees?
Asda will end its popular price guarantee – which promises to keep prices lower or equal to its competitors – on 3rd October after eight years running the scheme.
Asda justified the move saying the price match scheme was no longer relevant to shoppers – fewer than 1% of its customers are now actively using the scheme – but promised to replace it with generally lower prices on everyday items.
But this may be little consolation to shoppers who have already seen the price of many everyday items go up recently.
Currently under the scheme, Asda customers can compare the price of their shopping basket – for example, using price comparison sites – with Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Waitrose.
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And if the Asda shop isn’t 10% cheaper, the supermarket will issue customers the difference in vouchers to be used next time they’re in store.
End of an era
Previously, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s all ran similar price guarantees, but Asda was the first and last to do so. So does it mark the end of a golden era of good value supermarket shopping?
Price guarantees have never been a real substitute for value and I, personally, always treated them with a pinch of salt – just another example of supermarkets trying to influence our shopping decisions?
But now that the last one is being wound up, it feels like an end of an era. The promises of lower prices sound good but can the supermarkets actually deliver?
Shopping relic?
With disrupter supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl driving down prices and offering shoppers greater choice, it seems they’ll have to in order to survive.
To me price guarantees seem a bit of a relic from a time when ‘the big four’ – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons – reigned supreme, monopolising our food shopping.
So perhaps, with a lot of new players on the supermarket scene and more competition to drive down prices and attract new shoppers, these schemes are just no longer relevant.
But what do you think? Do you use price guarantees – or did you in the past? Has new competition from Aldi and Lidl made price guarantees irrelevant?
Do you use supermarket price matches?
Yes, regularly (70%, 396 Votes)
Never (21%, 117 Votes)
Once in a while (10%, 55 Votes)
Total Voters: 568
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