A community group says it’s discriminatory. Several lawmakers say it’s greed. Many grocers say it’s inflation and tariffs. But one grocery chain says the real reason prices are too high is because too many people are stealing stuff, and lawmakers aren’t doing enough to stop them.
New England’s Stop & Shop is in the midst of a two-year dispute over the prices in several of its Boston-area stores. And after defending itself, then lowering prices, only to face more complaints, the grocer isn’t having it anymore.
Stop & Shop and other retailers are “struggling with the vast impact of organized retail crime,” Stop & Shop President Roger Wheeler wrote last week in a letter to several members of Congress. “Our business’s ability to continue to invest in our stores, our customers, and our communities relies on Congressional action to stop organized retail crime.” He called on the lawmakers to “act swiftly by advancing legislation… to crack down on flash mob robberies and intricate retail theft schemes.”
The letter tosses the issue back in the lawmakers’ court, after they sent their own letter demanding answers about why Stop & Shop “appears to be over-charging families in inner-city neighborhoods.”
This all started a couple of years ago, when a group of young community organizers conducted price checks for the very same items sold by two different Stop & Shop stores – one in the city and another in a more affluent suburb. They found that the same basket of items cost 21% more in the city. After they asked Stop & Shop why, the retailer questioned their methodology and suggested they could have saved more had they simply bought more items that were on sale.
The group conducted a follow-up price check earlier this year, and found that most items at the two stores were now identically priced. That might have been the end of the story, except the group found that prices at stores in other lower-income areas of the city were still higher.
Their findings got the attention of several Democratic members of the state’s Congressional delegation: U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and U.S. Representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley. The lawmakers sent a letter to the CEO of Stop & Shop parent company Ahold Delhaize, seeking answers.
“Why does Stop & Shop still appear to be charging higher prices for groceries in low-income communities in Massachusetts?” they asked. “We urge Stop & Shop to lower prices at its grocery stores in Grove Hall, South Bay, and Mission Hill, and ensure that it is charging all Massachusetts families fair prices for the food they work hard to put on the table.”
It’s that letter that precipitated Wheeler’s response. Not only is retail theft a concern – and a greater concern in the city than in the suburbs – he said factors like rent, labor and transportation costs contribute to the “common practice” in the retail industry of charging different prices at different stores. “Stop & Shop does not under any circumstances take a neighborhood’s demographics into consideration when setting prices,” he insisted.
His letter didn’t say whether the publicity about last year’s price check prompted Stop & Shop to lower prices at the inner-city store that the youth organizers visited. Instead, he credited the retailer’s overall “strategy to lower everyday prices” for everyone. So far, those lower prices have been implemented in more than 40% of Stop & Shop stores, and he pledged that “by year-end 2025, prices will be lowered at all Stop & Shop locations” in Massachusetts.
Now if only something could be done about all the theft. In April, a bipartisan group of Senators reintroduced the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, which aims to “create new tools to tackle evolving trends in organized retail theft.” The National Retail Federation says it “strongly supports” the measure, noting that “organized retail crime and related thefts cannot be solved by the retail industry alone.”
So notwithstanding any pressure and negative publicity, Stop & Shop says it’s doing just fine with lowering its prices, thank you very much. It’s up to lawmakers, the retailer says, to help ensure that those prices can stay low going forward.
Image source: Ahold Delhaize
