Wal-Mart announced as part of their Black Friday promotion campaign that they “will match any price featured in a local competitor’s print advertisement if it has the identical product in stock.” If this is true, there should be some great bargains to pick up at your local Wal-Mart.

The key here is that they will match the price of any advertisement in the paper. Many stores advertise a limited quantity of deeply discounted loss leaders. Since Wal-Mart doesn’t specify a quantity, you probably will have a much better chance to get those deeply discounted loss leaders at your local Wal-Mart store as compared to the limited supply at the store advertising them.

My strategy would be as follows. I would get up early and circle all the deep discount loss leaders I could find in the circulars. I would make sure to arrive at Wal-Mart an hour before it opens and already have a plan as to what are the most important items from the circular to get. I would go through and get everything I could at the deep discount and make sure that Wal-Mart honored the price in the circular. While it would be a hectic morning, my guess is that the prices you receive will be lower than you’ll be able to find at any other point this year and you may actually be able to resell some items at a profit.

This move by Wal-Mart probably will not make other retailers in competition with them very happy. If I were a Wal-Mart competitor, however, I would make their promotion hurt more than they ever thought it possibly could. I would simply have a field day with this. I would load up my advertising circular with unheard of low prices limiting the quantity to 1. While I would lose a lot on the one item, the local Wal-Mart would lose that amount on hundreds of items (of course, I would pay a visit to my local Wal-Mart to make sure they had plenty in stock of whatever I was planning to deeply discount.

If you’re lucky, a local retailer in your area will think just as I did above and you may find huge discounts come Black Monday. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful holiday gift!