Whether or not you shop at Wal-Mart, the company still helps you pay lower prices for lots of things your family buys. How can that be? When Wal-Mart lowers prices, other stores tend to offer more discounts too in an effort to lure in shoppers. And it works!

Consumers feeling the pinch of higher gas and food prices are looking for more sales than ever before. Wal-Mart is using this to their advantage by lowering prices of key items. The company reports that in the first quarter of 2008, prices were cut on thousands of items. Some of the price cuts were as high as 30%.

I'm not a fan of Wal-Mart stores, but whether we love or hate the company doesn't matter. We benefit from their price-cutting. So you might be ticked off that Wal-Mart was able to grow company sales by 10% in the first quarter. Who cares! Consumers benefit whether they recognize it or not, and those lower prices at Target, Costco, Walgreens, and CVS are in part thanks to the price slashing of the mega-retailer. Happy shopping!

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.