Canadian Tire Money: How to Maximize It

A CT Money bonus event can hide a worse shelf price. A worked example of the math, when clearance plus bonus CT Money is worth waiting for, and why store prices differ.

Canadian Tire Money is a real discount, just a delayed one. The catch is that a bonus event makes the CT Money number loud and the shelf price quiet, and the shelf price is what decides whether you got a deal.

How CT Money works

Canadian Tire Money is the rewards currency in Triangle Rewards. You get a percentage of most purchases back as CT Money and spend it later at Canadian Tire, Mark's, SportChek, and Atmosphere. It's added automatically when you're signed in to Triangle Rewards at checkout.

The rate isn't fixed. It goes up during member bonus events and sits lower the rest of the time, so check the current offer in the Triangle app instead of assuming it matches what you earned last time.

Do the math on the shelf price first

Here's a made-up example. Say a cordless drill normally sells for $200, and this month you could buy it two ways:

At full price during a bonus event that returns 10% in CT Money: $20 back.
At a clearance price of $120, earning a regular rate of 1%: $1.20 back.

Once you've spent the CT Money, the bonus-event drill cost you $180 and the clearance drill about $119. The bigger CT Money number came attached to the worse deal, by roughly $60.

There's a second catch. CT Money is only worth something once you spend it, and only at Canadian Tire's family of stores. If you weren't planning to shop there again soon, a dollar of CT Money is worth less to you than a dollar off today.

The combination worth waiting for

The best case is a genuine clearance price during a bonus event. The two don't line up often, and you can only spot it if you know the base price apart from the promotion. That's what a price history chart gives you: what the item has actually sold for, so you can tell a real low with CT Money on top from the usual price wearing a bonus.

Prices differ from store to store

Canadian Tire prices vary between stores, and clearance prices most of all. ShelfAware scans roughly 500 Canadian Tire stores every day and lists anything 40% or more off, whether it's a store clearance or a national sale, with the price range across stores and the cheapest location. Canadian Tire also reports a unit count for each store, so you can see whether the cheap store has one left or ten.

Start with today's Canadian Tire clearance, or search an item to see its price history before deciding whether a bonus event is worth buying into. The Canadian Tire page has the rest.