TORONTO – ‘Tis the season for back-to-school shopping and Canadian parents are looking for deals.
Global News decided to head online to compare prices between various Canadian retailers, tallying up the cost of basic school supplies.
About the (unscientific) research
Here’s how I searched: I went to the Canadian websites for Walmart, Target Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart, Future Shop, Canadian Tire and Staples. I searched for items ranking search results from lowest price to the highest (I only want to see the deals). I adjusted unit prices (say if one store only offered a 20 pack of pencils and another only offered a 10 pack – I adjusted to figure out the price for each). When possible I would try and compare the same exact product.
I excluded Target Canada and Shoppers Drug Mart from the search because you can’t shop online. For the remaining four retailers, I excluded items that were only available in store.
NOTE: Online prices may have changed since I searched, for better or worse.
*Because there were so many backpacks to choose from, in a range of styles, age groups and quality, prices of backpacks were not included into the final totals.
How much does shipping cost?
- Future Shop offers free standard shipping on orders over $20 (before taxes, fees and promo codes).
- Canadian Tire offers an online ‘pay and pick up’ service, meaning you add items to your online cart and pay in advance, but then you must pick up your purchases in store. So there’s no shipping charge, but you’ll have to shell out for gas (and take time) to get to the store.
- Staples offers free shipping for orders over $45 (before taxes and coupons). Orders under $45 are charged a $15 shipping fee. For our sample supply list above, when you add in the shipping fee the total cost would be $33.52 plus applicable taxes.
- For most locations in Canada Walmart offers free standard shipping. So, for the items that we searched for in this experiment, Walmart ended up being the cheapest option of the four.
The take-away is that, though different retailers offer different deals, with some research online, major price differences emerge.
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