Stop & Shop responds to Boston youth group’s letter on price inequities
The grocery store Stop & Shop responded Thursday morning to criticism over its store pricing, calling a recent widely publicized letter from the Hyde Square Task Force that made demands of the company “misleading.”
In its letter to the grocery store chain Tuesday, youth with the Jamaica Plain nonprofit organization called on Stop & Shop to use its consumer data profits to eliminate the price inequities the group uncovered in a study last year. In that study, several Hyde Square Task Force youth organizers went on shopping trips to Stop & Shop stores in Jackson Square and Dedham, and found that a shopping cart of products from their neighborhood store cost $34 more than a similar grocery list at the suburban location.
“Since Stop & Shop is making millions from capturing and selling private and personal information of its customers, we would like to respectfully request that Stop & Shop use these profits to create price equity across your chain,” the teens said in their letter.
In response, Stop & Shop said that the youth’s shopping list compared less than 1 percent of the 10,000 items sold at the stores in Jackson Square and Dedham, and that the overall price difference is less than the 21 percent the original study reported.
The youth’s original study “avoided items on sale” to focus on items listed at regular price. However, Stop & Shop said in its statement that almost all of its sale items are equally priced across the entire chain.
“Knowing this fact, the students still did not include sale items in their follow-up research provided to The Globe in December,” the company wrote, referring to the youth’s subsequent shopping trips at the chain’s Grove Hall, Mission Hill, and South Bay locations.
Stop & Shop also points to two Boston stores, in Roslindale and Hyde Park, with similar pricing to that of the Dedham store.
The company also said that the youth’s letter misrepresented an August meeting, at which Hyde Square Task Force youth organizers convened with company representatives to discuss their pricing strategy. In the letter, the youth said the grocery chain’s lawyer “forcefully ordered the conversation to stop immediately” when probed about its consumer data policies.
The lawyer only sought to stop that line of conversation because the company’s representatives couldn’t answer questions that were out of their purview, the grocery store said.
“Our lawyer simply directed the conversation back to pricing because it was Stop & Shop’s pricing team in attendance, and they were not the right subject matter experts to adequately address other matters,” the company said.
Stop & Shop also pushed back on the letter’s mention of Stop & Shop’s opening of two food pantries at the Dimock Health Center and Roxbury Community College, stating that the timing of the grand openings after the initial study’s publication was merely a coincidence.
“These pantries take months — sometimes years — to build, stock, and become operational,” Stop & Shop said. “The plans for both the Dimock Center pantry and Roxbury Community College pantry were well underway before the Hyde Square Task Force made its interest known.”
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