Stop & Shop stores cut prices amid competition from discounters, affordability worries

Stop & Shop, the largest grocer on Long Island, recently lowered prices on thousands of products at 150 supermarkets, including all its stores on Long Island, as shoppers' affordability worries grow. 

The grocer and other traditional supermarket chains have been seeing their share of grocery revenue decline for the past several years as discounters and specialty grocers expand.

The biggest issue hurting Stop & Shop’s competitiveness is its prices, the chain's president, Roger Wheeler, told Newsday.

"People are hurting,” Wheeler said, as consumers contend with "higher gas prices, affordability challenges [and] reductions in government benefits." The price cuts will help consumers and drive traffic for Stop & Shop, he added.

Retailers don't lower prices often but doing so is a bold strategy that comes with risks, including possibly sending a negative message to customers about the previous prices, said Jon Hauptman, founder of Price Dimensions, a Chicago-based pricing adviser for supermarket chains.

The challenge for grocers lowering prices is to do it effectively and maintain those lower costs over time, he said.

As part of its revitalization plan, Stop & Shop lowered its prices between 5% and 35% on thousands of brand-name and store-brand products at 150 supermarkets in New Jersey, southern Connecticut and New York, including the 46 stores on Long Island, this month, the Quincy, Massachusetts-based retailer said. These are the retailer's last stores to get price cuts, after reductions were made at stores in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and most of Connecticut in 2024 and 2025.

Stop & Shop's recent price cuts come as grocery costs across the nation have surged, with experts citing as causes the war in Iran affecting fuel shipping and extreme winter weather impacting U.S. crop production, Newsday previously reported.

In the 25-county region that includes Long Island, the consumer price index, which is a measure of inflation, for grocery prices in April was 5.9% higher than it was in the same month last year, the biggest annual increase since April 2023, when prices rose 6.1% from the previous year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Last month, grocery prices in the region were 26% higher than they were in April 2020, the month after the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

Customers at a Stop & Shop in New Hyde Park on Friday welcomed news of the price cuts and said prices play a major role in how they choose to shop.

Kathleen Valentine, of Bellerose, who works part time, and her retiree husband are empty nesters who are working harder to stretch their budget, Valentine said.

“I’m always looking for the sale [in the store flyers]. That’s how I base my weekly meals,” said Valentine, 57.

Justine Kinsky, 35, of Floral Park, a married mother of two children, said the price cuts would likely inspire her to buy more products at Stop & Shop, especially since the costs of baby formula, berries and other items have risen so dramatically in recent years.

Stop & Shop’s prices were competitive with those of other traditional supermarkets even before the price cuts, but part of the retailer’s strategy to improve the customer experience includes changing public perceptions that Stop & Shop is high-priced, Wheeler said.

Competition from discounters, specialty stores

Founded in 1914, Stop & Shop operates 363 supermarkets in five Northeast states.

Last year, the grocer's 46 stores on Long Island accounted for 16.57% of the region’s market share, which is the percentage of grocery dollars spent, among all types of food sellers, including drugstores and convenience stores, according to Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.

That was down from the 21.02% market share that Stop & Shop had on Long Island in 2018, when it had 51 stores in the region.

Stop & Shop and other traditional supermarkets are being challenged by competitors on opposite ends of the price spectrum. At one end are discounters, which are drawing new middle-class customers worried about inflation. On the other end, specialty grocers are pulling higher-income shoppers looking for unique products.

Other grocers that have lowered their prices in recent years to lure back inflation-weary customers include Whole Foods Market, which was nicknamed “Whole Paycheck” by shoppers decades ago because of its high prices compared with competitors. In the last two years, Whole Foods has lowered prices on about 25% of the items in its stores, including more than 1,000 of its private-label products.

In 2025, Walmart said it increased the amount of price rollbacks by 30% in its fiscal second quarter compared with the same quarter a year earlier. 

Store remodels, more convenience part of plan

Stop & Shop was purchased in 1996 by Dutch company Ahold Delhaize, whose other U.S. grocery chains are Food Lion, Hannaford, Giant Food, Giant and Martin's. 

Ahold doesn’t report the sales performance of its chains individually but its overall U.S. stores’ sales have lagged or fallen in recent years.

In July 2024, about two months before Wheeler was appointed as president of Stop & Shop, Ahold closed 32 underperforming Stop & Shop supermarkets in five states, including four stores on Long Island.

In Ahold's U.S. business, net sales in the fiscal first quarter of this year, which ended March 28, slightly increased, by 1.5%, to $14.8 billion.

The company’s U.S. business does have some bright spots: Online grocery sales surged 14.3% to $1.4 billion in the fiscal first quarter this year.

In 2024, Ahold launched a revitalization strategy at Stop & Shop, which includes the price cuts, continuation of a store remodeling program that started in 2018 and introduction of Savings Stations kiosks, where digital coupons can be applied to store loyalty cards and the mobile app, in each store.

  By the end of this year, 44 Long Island stores will have been remodeled since 2018.