Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Wouldn’t Target want to say: “Don’t buy it from the rival. We’ll match the price, but it will take us four days to get it in”? I can see why customers might decline that offer—why should they wait? But why would Target shut down that option? If the customer is willing to wait, why not?

Target also wisely opted to not trust whatever image customers show on their phones, because it might be a manipulated image. Its shopper instructions: “Please show us your mobile device or a printout from a qualifying competitor’s Web site or Target.com. A Target team member will then verify the match using a Target device.”

Target has started thinking about whether key rivals will start offering CRM-based discounts, and it wants to short-circuit those efforts by excluding any “prices that only display on a Web site after guest login.” Target’s Deede added a more practical reason: Given that “a team member needs to verify the price using a Target device, the price must be accessible without a guest login,” she said.

But matching prices online is still very clearly a lot more difficult than old-fashioned brick-and-mortar price-match programs. True, there’s no online equivalent to “bring in a published newspaper ad,” but Target’s lengthy list of exclusions and limitations looks like a lawyer’s wonderland. And some of the items on that list appear to be made irrelevant by other items on the exclusions list. Target is trying really, really hard to close all the loopholes.

Unfortunately, the result of all that fine print comes across sounding something like this: “Target has a holiday price-match program. But if we can find any possible way at all to refuse to match a competitor’s price, we won’t do the match. Of course, because the only five competitors we’re matching are easily accessible from the phone, we insist that you show us their prices on your device and then you’re free to stand right there and buy from a competitor as soon as we refuse to price match. Thank you for trying and failing to shop at Target.”

Maybe Best Buy’s idea of giving associates the final say on whether to match prices isn’t so foolish after all. It really begs the question: Is rule rigidity—where commonsense need not apply—a better approach than discretion, where the customer isn’t certain whether the price will really be matched? Choose your price-match poison.