Apologies for not getting this article to you before the holidays – maybe it would have saved some of you a few bucks. Better late than never, right? Anyway, Walmart instituted an official policy to match online Amazon prices in their stores. Now people can get the prices they want and be able to take it home today. I guess the only sacrifice is time spent going to the store but for last-minute shoppers like me this is great!
On a side note, if anyone from Walmart reads this and wants to give me the data they have an interesting quasi-natural experiment on their hands. With half of the stores already doing the matching and the others forced to match we should be able to see what happened to a lot of interesting metrics with a difference-in-differences type analysis. The hard part is figuring out the initial selection to offer the match before the policy was in place (and possibly some way of measuring adherence to the policy) but I think it’s doable.
Credit to William Montgomery, a Penn State/Smeal College of Business student, for bringing this article to my attention.