Canadian Tire says consumer sentiment ‘soft’ amid trade war, tariffs

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.