For deal-seekers, it’s like getting the Sears Christmas catalogue every week: the Saturday-morning flyer haul also known as the weekend newspaper. Mental checklist tallying away, they peruse the typeset aisles, looking for $1 here, or $0.50 there, noting where they will spend their shopping dollars this week.

It’s a time-honoured tradition, but are flyers as effective an advertising medium as they once were? QMI Sales, a division of Quebecor, was perhaps wondering the same thing when it recently commissioned a Leger Marketing study to investigate flyer readership in Canada.

The survey took into account the responses of 1,500 Canadians from Ontario and Quebec, finding that 76% of all respondents said they looked at flyers at least once a week, 80% said they enjoyed looking at flyers and another 80% said they consult flyers when making special purchases. A slightly lower percentage, 67%, said they make actual purchase decisions based on flyer sales (the figure was higher in Ontario at 71%) but 66% said that they agreed with the statement that flyers are a part of their regular shopping routine.

Grocery stores, unsurprisingly, ranked the highest among aided recall of types of stores or companies that respondents remembered receiving flyers from, while drug stores and pharmacies, electronic stores, hardware/home building/renovation stores and department stores ranked below it in respective order.

And in an extra bit of good news for the survey’s sponsor, newspapers appeared to remain an effective distribution method, with 63% of respondents saying they are more likely to look at flyers distributed via newspapers.