r/frugalcanada

Westboro Superstore Ottawa.

Bought this pack of bacon a while ago and just discovered it’s 40g short. So sick of this shit. Didn’t these big chain stores just get busted AGAIN for this shenanigans? They shorted me 10% of the product, how is that not theft?

Every week for my site Is That a Deal, I pull the Ontario flyers and compare every price against the Statistics Canada provincial average to find what's actually worth buying. Here's what stood out this week. Everything here is at least 27% below the typical Ontario price.

🥩 Beef tenderloin — $19.99/lb at Metro (-38% avg) Whole beef tenderloin vac pack. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

🥩 Beef striploin / NY strip — $10.88/lb at Loblaws (-39% avg) Striploin grilling steak. Ends May 17. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

🥩 Pork back ribs — $3.99/lb at No Frills (-51% avg) Pork back ribs. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, or Real Canadian Superstore

🍗 Chicken wings — $3.99/lb at Food Basics (-50% avg) Fresh chicken wings. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

🍗 Chicken breast (bone-in) — $3.99/lb at Real Canadian Superstore (-41% avg) Bone-in skinless chicken breast. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, or No Frills

🐟 Salmon — $8.99/lb at Food Basics (-31% avg) Fresh Atlantic salmon portions. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

🫑 Bell peppers — $2.49/lb at FreshCo (-55% avg) Sweet green bell peppers. Ends May 20. Match at Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

🥩 Beef brisket — $7.99/lb at Metro (-27% avg) Whole beef brisket vac pack. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

🌿 Asparagus — $2.50/lb at Loblaws (-50% avg) Fresh asparagus. Ends May 20. Match at FreshCo, Giant Tiger, No Frills, or Real Canadian Superstore

Best single stop this week: No Frills or Real Canadian Superstore. Both will price match almost everything on this list. Bring the flyer screenshots and you can hopefully get 4+ of these deals in one trip without driving all over town.

Price matching requires showing a digital or print flyer at the till. Same brand, size, and weight. Always confirm in-store. YMMV

I also built a free tool where you can check any grocery price yourself

Hey r/frugalcanada,

Disclosure first: A friend of mine in Canada built a free price-history tool called Lowvyn (https://lowvyn.com) and asked me to share it here. I am not the founder. I know him personally. He specifically wanted this sub to weigh in because r/frugalcanada is the audience most likely to push back on the methodology, and he would rather hear honest criticism here than soft praise from his own circle.

What it does: You paste a URL from Amazon.ca, Walmart.ca, or Best Buy Canada into https://lowvyn.com/check-deal. The tool pulls the last 90 days of observed prices for that product and tells you whether the current price is meaningfully below, near, or above the recent average. The point is to ignore the "was/now" price on the retailer page and compare the current price to what people actually paid over the last 3 months.

Why this matters: Canadian retailers play the inflated-reference-price game just as hard as US ones do. A car seat listed at $549.99 with a strikethrough of $799.99 may have been priced at $549.99 for the last three months, with the $799.99 being a number that wasn't paid. The tool accurately flags the current price. The label "real deal" is reserved for prices that sit at least 20% below the 90-day average. Same rule across all three retailers.

What you should know before you try it:

- Free. No signup needed for the URL checker or the weekly research index at https://lowvyn.com/research/canadian-baby-price-index.

- The catalogue is heavy on baby gear right now (around 8,000 Canadian baby products tracked, 475 of which are at a real-deal price this week). If you paste a product the tool does not yet have a history for, it tells you so honestly instead of making something up. There is an opt-in email to be pinged when a product is added.

- Outbound links to Amazon carry an Amazon Associates tag. That is how my friend pays for the daily scraping. Walmart and Best Buy outbound links pass through with no affiliate tag.

- One-person operation, working on this part-time. Some things will be rough around the edges.

What I am asking from this sub: Honest feedback on the methodology and what categories to add next. If you try the URL checker on something you are actually shopping for and the answer looks wrong, drop the URL in a comment with what the tool told you. He will fix the parser. If there is a category you want him to start tracking, name it.

Thanks for reading.

$2. Stocked up on discount weiners. A little sketchy but at just slightly over $1 per kilo I had to pull the trigger. Compare to Juicy Jumbos at $20 a kilo in the same store.

​Hey everyone,

​I know Canadian Tire sells a mix of domestic and imported goods, but as a legacy Canadian retailer, I figured this community might appreciate a tool I built to make shopping there a lot easier (and cheaper).

​With the cost of living right now, I’ve been trying to hunt down more clearance deals. But the Canadian Tire website makes it notoriously difficult to see actual, heavily discounted clearance stock at your local stores without clicking through hundreds of pages.

I spent my evenings building a homegrown web app to solve this. It’s called ClearanceCheck.ca.

​How it works:

​📍 You put in your postal code (or use your device's GPS) to search stores within a radius.

​🔥 It instantly scrapes the store and only shows you items that are 40% OFF or more.

​📦 It taps into the backend to show you the ACTUAL stock numbers (e.g., "⚠️ Only 2 left" or "📦 18 in stock") so you don't waste gas driving to a store for phantom inventory.

​🔽 You can sort by the highest discount percentage or the lowest price.

​Link: https://www.clearancecheck.ca

​Full transparency: I am not a business. This is a 100% free, Canadian-made passion project.

I’ve never heard of this company, but I feel like $1.94 for 2lbs of jumbo dogs it’s worth it to throw on the BBQ as an experiment… or no?