Warren presses Stop & Shop on grocery prices after study shows differences across neighborhoods

A customer pushed a shopping cart out of South Bay's Stop & Shop.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

For more than a year, youth organizers with the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain have pressed grocery giant Stop & Shop on pricing differences at its Greater Boston locations, alleging that grocery costs in its stores located in more affluent neighborhoods are cheaper than stores that are not.

The teen sleuths received reinforcements earlier this week when members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation sent a letter to Stop & Shop’s parent company demanding it provide answers.

In a four-page letter addressed to Frans Muller, CEO of Ahold Delhaize, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote that the popular grocery chain could be “engaging in corporate profiteering schemes that squeeze residents and families in Massachusetts,” based on the youths’ report that was first published in the Globe in June 2023. The letter asks Muller for information on what factors impact pricing differences among the state’s Stop & Shop stores, where the highest and lowest prices for the teens’ original shopping list are in Massachusetts, and the steps the company has taken to make groceries more affordable for customers.

Charging 18 percent more for a shopping cart of items in Jackson Square than in nearby Dedham Stop & Shop, Warren said, “that’s just not right.”

She added: “Giant corporations are squeezing families for fatter profits, and we need to fight back.”

The lawmakers gave Ahold Delhaize an Oct. 14 deadline to provide information on pricing algorithms and updated prices for the products in the Hyde Square Task Force report.

Stop & Shop confirmed that it received the letter, and told the Globe it plans to respond in the coming weeks. The grocery chain said in a statement that it is undergoing a “multi-year strategy to invest in pricing and lower everyday prices across all its stores,” and has recently dropped prices on thousands of products in Western Mass., Connecticut, and some Boston area stores.

The Quincy-based grocery chain also announced plans in July to close 32 stores nationwide by November.

The company said that various factors such as rent costs, labor costs, and size might affect pricing location to location. The Dedham location, for example, has similar prices to Stop & Shop’s Hyde Park and Roslindale locations “in part due to having tenants at these locations that offset operating costs,” the company said.

In previous statements, Stop & Shop has stood by its pricing, and once called the youths’ reports on grocery costs in the area “misleading.”

“Under no circumstances does Stop & Shop consider a store neighborhood’s socioeconomic makeup when setting prices,” a company spokesperson said in response to Warren’s letter.

The Globe visited four stores in Greater Boston — Jamaica Plain, Dedham, Grove Hall, and Hingham — in late September to see if the highlighted price differences remained a year later. The Globe compared prices for a 15-product list across the locations. Indeed, the Dedham Stop & Shop had the lowest prices across all four stores, save for temporary sales on Eggo blueberry waffles and fruit punch Capri-Sun juice pouches, as well as store-brand honey wheat bread at Jamaica Plain.

A Stop & Shop spokesperson said the pricing at its Jamaica Plain, Grove Hall, and Hingham stores are uniform, so there should be no markdowns at one location without the other two. They did not mention why some items were priced differently across these three stores.

The Jamaica Plain and Grove Hall stores are located in census neighborhoods with typical household incomes of $35,900 and $41,068 in 2022, respectively. The Hingham location is in a census neighborhood with a median household income of more than $211,000.

The Globe’s shopping list also incorporated four products from the Hyde Square Task Force’s original report published in June 2023. Store-brand crinkle-cut fries and pepperoni pizza dropped $.10 and $.20 in Jamaica Plain, respectively. A quart of Brigham’s vanilla ice cream rose by a dollar at both stores since last summer. A single pack of mesquite-smoked Oscar Mayer sliced turkey breast spiked by nearly $2 in Jackson Square, and rose by $0.69 in suburban Dedham.

The Hyde Square Task Force’s report, while published more than a year ago, is still timely. Vice President Kamala Harris has made a federal ban on “price gouging,” a catch-all term that refers to raising product prices higher than what is considered reasonable, a key policy platform in her presidential bid. And politicians, catching wind of Americans’ growing frustration at rising grocery prices, have introduced legislation to crack down on such spikes.

Price gouging bans are already in effect in 37 states, including Massachusetts. In the Bay State, though, these are statutes that protect customers against price spikes during declared emergencies, such as the coronavirus pandemic.

Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, reintroduced a federal bill in February that would give the Federal Trade Commission and state attorney generals power to enforce national price gouging bans. However, she said she felt compelled to raise the issue’s impacts on the local level after reviewing the Hyde Square Task Force report.

“I want to give a lift to our young people who spotted this, figured out a way to test this, did the legwork, and now have raised the issue,” Warren told a Globe reporter. “I’ll be their backup singer.”

Danny Vargas, a Jamaica Plain resident, coauthored the reports as a graduating senior from the City on a Hill Charter Public School. Now, he works part time as an organizer at the Hyde Square Task Force, and still shops at the neighborhood store centered in the study.

“Every time I go shopping with my family, they complain to me that the prices there keep increasing,” Vargas, 19, a second-year computer science student at Bunker Hill Community College, said. “It’s expensive to buy food.”

As a college student and organizer, Vargas said he’s swamped with different community issues, but is excited to see a return on his efforts with Warren’s letter.

“It feels like I’m actually contributing to something major,” Vargas said. His group is “actually getting state reps to work with youth so that we can take down these corporate entities that just keep taking our money.”

Vargas doesn’t know if the group will get more information on Stop & Shop’s pricing algorithms. But he remains hopeful that elected officials are on his side.