Canadian Tire Inc. says its customers are increasingly focused on maximizing value and that higher sales last quarter were thanks to new AI pricing strategies and its growing loyalty program to help meet consumers where they are, along with heightened demand during the FIFA World Cup.

Other retailers like Dollarama and Walmart recently reported higher sales from consumers looking for value, and Metro said Wednesday that it plans to convert 10 stores to Food Basics discount grocery banners to meet that trend.

Greg Hicks, president and CEO of Canadian Tire Inc., said on a call with analysts Thursday that “consumer sentiment remained soft” during the last quarter.

“For a long while now, consumers have been living with the threat of trade wars and tariffs and managing the day-to-day pressure of higher food and gas prices.”

Canadian Tire Inc. released its quarterly earnings results Thursday for the three-month period ending July 4, 2026, and reported overall sales increased 0.7 per cent compared to a year earlier.

The company is behind the flagship Canadian Tire banner of stores, in addition to Sport Chek, Mark’s, Party City, Atmosphere, PartSource, Sports Experts, Pro Hockey Life, Trio Hockey, Canadian Tire Gas, as well as a financial services division and a real estate investment trust.

Although overall sales were relatively flat, Canadian Tire Inc. says comparable sales were up eight per cent at Sport Chek and 4.2 per cent at Mark’s.

Across many of these retail stores, Canadian Tire says it lowered prices on thousands of products selected with the help of AI tools.

“We kept our value proposition sharp using our DaiVID AI analysis to drop prices on more than 5,000 products, and we saw strong customer response to lower prices on essentials like cleaning and storage,” said Hicks on the call.

TJ Flood, the company’s chief operating officer, also commented on these AI pricing strategies during the call.

“Most of our price changes are deliberate to try to provide value where we think Canadians want value, and our elasticity curves point us in those directions,” he said.

“We use our sophisticated AI models to point us in the right direction. There are at times, we do have to watch competitive activity and react based on what the competition does.”

Although Canadian Tire says it has been using these tools to determine where to lower prices, the company did not specify if the same AI tools could be used to strategize when to raise prices.

This is commonly known as algorithmic or dynamic pricing, and a Canadian Tire spokesperson said in a statement responding to a Global News request that the company does not use its pricing AI tools for these purposes.

“DaiVID is CTC’s [Canadian Tire Corporation’s] AI-powered pricing and promotions platform, which helps inform pricing decisions and has contributed to improved customer value perception, including through recent price reductions on more than 5,000 products,” the statement said.

“We do not use DaiVID for algorithmic pricing or real-time dynamic pricing. It is a longer-term pricing tool. Price changes are reviewed, planned, and scheduled through our established pricing processes.”

The company saw an eight per cent increase at Sport Chek thanks mainly to recent sporting events.

“Sport Chek’s eight per cent comparable sales increase was a very strong result, supported by strategic inventory investments ahead of major sporting events,” said chief financial officer Darren Myers on the call.

“World Cup sales accounted for roughly half of the growth, with Montreal Canadiens fan wear sales also contributing.”

Loyalty programs are another way consumers have been looking to maximize value, and Canadian Tire says its Triangle Rewards loyalty program continues to grow memberships. Purchases made by those with memberships once again outpaced those without memberships, the company said in the earnings report.

Overall, loyalty-related sales were up 3.1 per cent compared to a year earlier.

The company said there are more than 12 million members of the loyalty program, and two million of them are considered active with at least one loyalty partnership, including Petro-Canada, RBC and WestJet. This means many Triangle Rewards members are looking to rack up more points by choosing to spend money at these other partner businesses.

“ECTM [Electronic Canadian Tire Money] is obviously exclusive to us. It is a big part of our Triangle program and a huge part of the value that we are providing to customers in a very difficult environment,” said Hicks on the call.

“More [ECTM] issuance equals more redemption. More redemption equals add-on sales and more first-party data generation. That is the strategy behind it.”

Hicks continued: “Partnerships are an entirely net new lever relative to last year, and then just this value focus. This is a way that we can give very differentiated value to a value-focused consumer on value economy.”