Stop & Shop lowering prices on thousands of items, new company president says

QUINCY, Mass. — Some Stop & Shop stores in New England have lowered prices on thousands of items, the new president of the Quincy-based grocery chain recently said.

In an exclusive interview with The Providence Journal, Stop & Shop president Roger Wheeler said stores in Rhode Island have cut prices on about 3,500 items.

“We don’t want to be known for always having the highest price,” Wheeler told the newspaper. “We want you to think of us in a different way than you might have thought of us for the last however many years.”

Examples of price drops Stop & Shop shared with the newspaper included:

• Boneless chicken breast from $3.99 a pound to $2.79 a pound
• Six-ounce Yoplait yogurt from $1 each to 89 cents
• One-pound Land O’ Lakes butter from $7.39 to $6.29
• One-pound Stop & Shop brand pasta from $1.39 to $1.19

The Journal also reported that Stop & Shop has done away with the 10-cent fee it had been charging Rhode Island customers for paper bags.

“It’s causing a lot of kind of angst, on top of everything else, getting charged for a bag,” Wheeler said in the interview.

Stop & Shop is also reportedly installing “savings kiosks” in each store, hopefully making it easier for customers to utilize various deals that the chain offers.

The chain noted that it’s also working to make changes at store locations in Massachusetts.

News of these changes comes just two weeks after a teen task force study found price gouging between Stop and Shop locations in Massachusetts.

Stop & Shop said over the summer that it planned to close nearly three dozen “underperforming” stores, including several in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, by November.

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