I was going to place an order with DFS for several hundred dollars worth of stuff, but I needed some of the items sooner than later. Since Pestmart was local, I thought I might as well support a local merchant who was willing to match the DFS price. Because I had an order together that was big enough to qualify for flat-rate shipping, these items wouldn't have added to my DFS shipping bill. By buying them at Pestmart I was going to have to pay sales tax, and although it was going to cost me a bit more to shop locally, I decided to support a local merchant and pay a little more to pick up a few things quickly.
Price matching at Pestmart was a royal PITA. I phoned before I left from home and asked for the fish department manager. I asked if she would price match other merchants. She said yes. I asked if she would price match on-line merchants. She said yes. I specifically asked if she would price match the sale prices in the DFS catalog. She said yes. So I drove to Pestmart.
When I got there I talked to the fish manager. She was happy to price match for me. The checkout clerk was also happy to price match for me. When ringing things up she needed a manager to override the store's normal pricing, and the store's general manager stepped in. He didn't want to price match.
The Stealth heater that I was buying had to be marked down by about a 65% discount to match the DFS price. Same for the API Saltwater Test Kit. Some of the Pestmart prices on dry goods are so high that they're ridiculous, but that's another story.
The general manager saw how much he had to mark the items down (like taking the test kit and the heater down from $35 to $15) that he refused to match the DFS catalog price.
I pointed to the sign on the door that said, "We will match any competitor's price." He said that the policy didn't include internet stores or catalogs. Then I told him that I had phoned in advance to confirm that the price matching policy would be honored, and one of the store's department managers / authorized representatives confirmed that they would price match. Even though he was not a party to the phone conversation that I had had with the other manager, he proceeded to tell me what had been said in my previous telephone conversation with the fish department manager. Of course, he had no idea how the conversation had actually gone, so he just started making things up.
I called the fish department manager to the front of the store, and the general manager interrogated her about our conversation. she backed me up, so he started to yell at her. At this point the entire scene was becoming quite a farce, because he was yelling at his department manager in front of a dozen or so customers at the checkout line.
After yelling at her, he told me that she had made a mistake and he would not honor the DFS prices. At that point I told him that I had been a customer at that store for the past 6 years, and that I had bought a 37 pound bag of ProPlan dog food there every month for the past 6 years. I told him that he was either going to price match like he's supposed to, or I would never return to the store to buy another bag of dog food. He said no.
This went on and on for a few minutes. Eventually he offered to price match one time only (but not the next time). After price matching the 3 items I was going to buy, he wanted to charge me $9.99 in shipping charges to sweeten the deal for him.
At that point I told him that it was not ethical for him to charge me for shipping if he had no intention of shipping the merchandise to me. I also told him that because I was placing a large enough order with DFS to qualify for flat rate shipping, the 3 items that I was buying at Pestmart would not have added any shipping charges to my order.
He finally agreed to price match without additional charges, but he told me that this was a one-time-only deal, and that I should not come back to the store with a DFS catalog in hand, because the next time I came in there would be no price matching for me.
The long and short of it is that I was able to get the manager at Pestmart to price match the DFS price. But I had to spend about 20 minutes in the store arguing with him to make it happen, and he told me never to come back asking for a similar deal. After jumping through all of the hoops that were required to close the deal, I have decided that its probably just not worth the effort of trying to support a local merchant in a situation like that. Being asked to price match just rubs them the wrong way.
Has anyone else had a good or bad experience at the Hobart/Merrillville Pestmart?
