Target Ends Price Matching With Amazon and Walmart, Bets We’ll Trust the Sticker

Target’s retreat from matching Amazon and Walmart prices signals shifting competitive priorities for big-box retail—and models a new calculus for New York’s price-conscious shoppers.

At the bustling Atlantic Terminal Target, a telltale sign hangs near the customer service desk: “No Longer Price Matching Walmart or Amazon as of July 28.” For years, New Yorkers have deployed their phones to secure bargains at the counter, deftly brandishing screenshots from rival online retailers to shave a few dollars off toaster ovens or toddler shoes. Soon, those digital negotiations will cease. Target, the country’s seventh-largest retailer, is ending its longstanding price-match offer with Amazon and Walmart—once a powerful tool for shoppers seeking the city’s best deal.

From July 28, Target will match only its own prices. If a shopper spots a lower price on Target.com or via the retailer’s digital deals platform, Target Circle, the company will refund the difference—so long as the claim is made within 14 days. “We found that our guests overwhelmingly price match Target and not other retailers,” the firm’s spokesperson explained, declaring its internal pricing as the new benchmark. The move ends a period where brick-and-mortar chain stores grudgingly mirrored their online adversaries’ pricing, a war waged as much in public relations as in dollars and cents.

For the city’s notoriously value-driven demographics—students in Morningside Heights, families in Jackson Heights, pensioners in Co-op City—it is a curiously blunt pivot. The price-match policy has never been a windfall, but it offered a measure of leverage in a metropolis where small savings are hard-earned and quickly spent. Target’s city footprint, spanning two dozen stores from Harlem to Staten Island, becomes subtly less competitive just as summer inflation nibbles at household budgets.

The effect ripples. Many New Yorkers, already battered by a cost-of-living crisis, rely heavily on big-box retailers for groceries and household essentials. “If Target isn’t matching Amazon, I might as well just order online,” grumbles Sema, a Flatbush teacher canvassing for back-to-school deals. Her reasoning is hard to dispute; Amazon’s relentless logistics have trained even Manhattanites—once loyal to bodegas—to expect door-to-door convenience at rock-bottom prices.

At first glance, the policy’s impact may seem paltry—after all, Target’s own data suggests most price-matching requests involved Target’s own digital channels. Yet, this obscures the policy’s symbolism. By refusing to shadow Amazon and Walmart on pricing, Target essentially asks New Yorkers for trust: that prices in store and online will, on average, hold their own. For the metropolis, where comparison shopping is raised to an art, this is bewildering faith.

The implications extend well beyond savings on dish soap. Price-matching was part of a broader ecosystem that encouraged major retailers to keep one another honest—at least at the checkout. Removing these guardrails could, in theory, reduce competitive pressure and enable a slow drift upwards in prices or a quiet hollowing-out of loss-leading deals. At a moment when the spectre of urban retail “deserts” looms over parts of the Bronx and eastern Brooklyn, fewer pricing checks mean higher stakes for working New Yorkers balancing rent, MetroCards, and groceries.

On a second-order level, Target’s decision shines a spotlight on the shifting frontiers of retail competition. Squeezed by wafer-thin margins, big-box chains now pin their hopes on exclusive “owned” brands, curated digital experiences, and loyalty apps—Target Circle, still free to join, has quietly amassed millions of New Yorkers. The chain’s in-house labels (think Good & Gather and Cat & Jack) let it sidestep direct price comparison with Amazon’s tens of thousands of third-party sellers. Technology, rather than pure discounting prowess, is becoming the lever retailers pull to foster loyalty.

Politically, the move further exposes the city’s digital divide. Price-matching once offered a lifeline for those physically present in stores; now, those who can fluently navigate apps are likelier to snag deals. Retailers are, perhaps unwittingly, shifting power from the fixed-income elderly and cash-reliant households in legacy neighbourhoods toward younger, mobile-savvy consumers. The peloton of automatons—be they corporate bots optimising prices or gig workers hustling deliveries—only grows.

In a wider context, Target’s retrenchment mirrors the national retail dynamic, where the initial e-commerce shock of the 2010s has matured into a kind of uneasy coexistence. Big-box chains have stopped racing Amazon and Walmart dollar-for-dollar and are instead courting shoppers’ data and attention through ever more elaborate loyalty schemes. In Britain, grocers quietly dropped cross-store price-matching years ago. Germany’s Aldi never bothered. American consumers, ever more digitally tracked, find themselves with fewer straightforward options but more “tailored” offers—at the price of their personal data.

For New York’s shoppers, the era of price-matching against web giants is quietly ending

Still, the city is not without leverage. The density that makes Gotham’s retail scene so peculiar also breeds its own forms of resilience. With Amazon’s growing network of same-day and even two-hour delivery in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Walmart’s digital consortium (including Jet.com, before its demise), the tension between local presence and digital convenience will persist. “Value” may soon be measured less in the price stamped on the box and more in the ease of a return, quality of service, or ethical sourcing—a shift that will suit some neighbourhoods and alienate others.

This is, in a sense, the quiet exit of a shopping ritual: the performative price challenge, the brief high of besting the system, is consigned to the dustheap. In its place will stand digital nudges, app notifications, and the soft tyranny of algorithms. Target—a store once lauded for democratizing chic—now trusts its customers to forgo yesterday’s tactics and embrace tomorrow’s subscriptions.

Will this breed acrimony or merely an indifferent shrug? Early evidence in other markets suggests few will defect en masse, just as few noticed once-musty amenities like “rain cheques” fading away. But, as New York’s cost-of-living crisis endures, even small erosions of purchasing power gnaw at urban vitality. And history suggests that retailers, once unmoored from visible constraints, rarely race to the bottom on prices again.

In sum, Target’s shift is less about rebuffing rival giants than spelling out the new rules of retail engagement. As price-matching wanes, retailers wager that convenience, brand loyalty, and data-driven deals matter more in the metropolis than a dollar saved at the till. For now, New Yorkers are left to reckon: trust the store—or trust the algorithm? ■