Latest news with #Quincy-based
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mass. lawmakers pen letter to Stop & Shop after study still finds price gouging in inner-city stores
A new study suggests Stop & Shop is still overcharging families in inner-city neighborhoods, prompting several Massachusetts lawmakers to press the company's CEO for plans to lower prices across the Bay State. The Hyde Square Task Force conducted a follow-up investigation to their June 2023 study that found the Quincy-based grocery chain was overcharging groceries in lower income communities, specifically at the Stop & Shop on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. The investigation led to lower prices at the store, but the Boston nonprofit recently reviewed other inner-city Stop & Shop locations and reportedly found families are still being overcharges. The task force points to the Grove Hall, South Bay, and Mission Hill stores, where certain grocery items are more than $2 their counterpart at stores in Dedham. Stop & Shop lowering prices on thousands of items, new company president says U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, along with Representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley pressed Frans Muller, CEO of Ahold Delhaize (Stop & Shop's parent company) for answers. 'The Hyde Square Task Force's April 2025 review reveals that, in response to our September 2024 letter, Stop & Shop fulfilled its promise to lower prices at the Jamaica Plain location: the 18 staple grocery items were either precisely or approximately the same price at the Jamaica Plain and Dedham location,' the lawmakers letter read. 'However, as of April 2025, nearly all of the 18 grocery items appeared to still be more expensive at the Grove Hall, South Bay, and Mission Hill locations compared to the suburban Dedham location.' The lawmakers outlined four questions they want answered by May 14: Why does Stop & Shop still appear to be charging higher prices for groceries in low income communities in Massachusetts? In response to our September 30, 2024 letter, Stop & Shop said that it had 'launched a multi-year strategy to invest in pricing and lower everyday prices across all our stores,' including in each store in Western Massachusetts and 'select locations in the Boston market,' including the Jamaica Plain location. Please provide a summary of how this project has worked so far. How did Stop & Shop select the Massachusetts store locations would be included in this strategy? Please list all of the Massachusetts store locations that were selected to be included in the price reductions. Specifically, which 'select locations' in the Boston market were included in this strategy? Please list each store location. Were the Grove Hall, South Bay, and Mission Hill locations included in this strategy? If not, why not? Please provide, for the 18 items included in the Hyde Square Task Force's study, the five highest and five lowest prices that they are currently being sold for in Massachusetts Stop & Shop locations and provide the locations of each group of five. Since our September 30, 2024 letter, Stop & Shop appears to have closed seven store locations in Massachusetts. What impact, if any, has this had on Stop & Shop's pricing decisions? Why did Stop & Shop decide to close these stores? 'It's no coincidence that working-class communities are getting stuck with sky-high prices,' said Senator Warren. 'We're keeping up the pressure to make sure Stop & Shop isn't overcharging families for the food they work hard to put on the table.' In a statement, spokesperson for Stop & Shop said the following: Stop & Shop remains committed to lowering prices across all of our stores in Massachusetts – and that work, which is already underway, will continue throughout 2025. Stop & Shop is also deeply committed to the neighborhoods we serve and will continue to invest in our stores and in our communities through programs like the Stop & Shop School Food Pantry Program, which offers consistent access to healthy food for thousands of students in need every month including students at more than 20 Boston Public Schools. The full letter lawmakers wrote to Ahold Delhaize USA can be read below: Mass. Lawmakers Follow-up Letter to Stop Shop by Boston 25 Desk on Scribd This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
Boston Globe
03-04-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
From Wayfair to Temu, Boston-based retail companies face gut punch from tariffs. But there's one that might benefit.
That leaves retailers with an unpleasant choice: hike prices and risk scaring off customers, or absorb the tariffs themselves and take a hit to profits. Related : Advertisement 'Wayfair and a lot of companies have been trying to maneuver their supply chain away from China,' Bentley University economics professor David Gulley said. 'But when the tariffs were announced [Wednesday], they were dramatically broader than expected, and hit basically every country we trade with. And then they were dramatically higher than what was expected.' And that appears to have taken some companies by surprise. As tariffs loomed on China in recent months, executives at Quincy-based women's clothing retailer had been saying the company does not import much from China. Indeed, its top overseas suppliers, according to securities filings, are India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Advertisement 'For the most part, you feel like we're in a pretty good place,' chief financial officer Mark Webb said at an investor conference in January. 'Where it lands, we will be extremely interested in . . . We'll have to wait and see.' Trump announced tariffs on India, Indonesia, and Vietnam of between 26 percent and 46 percent. did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday; its stock price dropped 9 percent. Boston-based Wayfair has also emphasized the diversity of its suppliers beyond China, in response to questions about tariffs in recent months. 'We as a platform, because we have 20,000-plus suppliers, we work with all of these folks,' chief executive Niraj Shah told analysts in February. 'So we haven't like made a bet, hey, we're buying from these Chinese factories.' Still, on Thursday, while its stock price plunged nearly 26 percent, Wayfair sounded an optimistic note. The company said it remained 'well-positioned to continue offering customers the best possible combination of value, assortment, and experience,' adding that 'periods of disruption create opportunities for strong companies like Wayfair to grow market share by consistently delivering great options to customers.' Wayfair's stock price plunged nearly 26 percent. Andrew Burke-Stevenson for The Boston Globe It wasn't all gloom for retailers. One potential winner — at least measured by stock performance price — from Wednesday's news appears to be TJX. The Framingham-based parent company of Marshalls, and HomeGoods brands saw its shares increase by 1 percent while the rest of the market tumbled. Analysts pointed to the discount retailer's strategy of buying unsold merchandise on the cheap from other retailers that has already been imported and thus avoid additional tariffs as an advantage. Also, TJX's low prices could become more attractive to consumers feeling the pinch of higher prices from tariffs at other stores. Advertisement 'Among the better positioned in our coverage, we see off-price TJX . . . [as] trade down beneficiaries,' analyst Mark Altschwager at Baird Equity Research wrote in a report on Wednesday evening. Of course, the goal of the tariffs isn't simply to shift consumption around among competing companies. It's to entice more manufacturing back to the United States, Trump said Wednesday. 'These tariffs are going to give us growth like you've never seen before,' he said. 'It'll be something very special to watch.' But these New England-based retailers also illustrate why that will be harder than it might sound. For many products, building new factories will take years and cost billions of dollars. For simpler goods, like clothing, relying on more expensive US labor would cause prices to skyrocket. 'The problem with this strategy is that many of the goods sold by Wayfair and J. Jill involve labor-intensive production, which is why they are sourced in lower-wage countries,' Babson College emeritus economics professor Kent Jones said. 'It's difficult to comply with the new tariffs without resorting to production alternatives using high-cost labor.' Container ships wait to enter the Port of Los Angeles. ERIN SCHAFF/NYT Trump's new policies also include closing a tariff loophole that some online retailers had been using to sell cheap goods from China. The regulation, known as the 'de minimus rule,' allows a shipper to avoid tariffs on shipments worth less than $800. E-commerce sites such as Temu, with its US operation based in Boston, Advertisement Amid the plunging stock market and rising consumer concerns, economic experts questioned whether Trump's goal of shifting all manufacturing back into the United States 'We make almost nothing from scratch in America, almost everything requires at least some inputs from abroad,' said Jason Furman, a former top economic aid to President Barack Obama who now teaches at Harvard. 'Overall a few companies will gain but many more will lose — while virtually all consumers will have to pay more.' Aaron Pressman can be reached at
Boston Globe
14-02-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
The next frontier for housing: Suburban office parks
The Advertisement Indeed, Jeremy A. Freid, senior partner at Newton-based commercial brokerage 128 CRE, said many property owners in Boston's suburbs are examining their holdings to see whether demolishing them and building multifamily housing makes sense. In an ongoing post-Covid shakeout, suburban office has been hit hard; along Route 128 and 495, more than 2 million square feet of office space has been emptied in the last year alone, according to real estate firm Newmark. Demand for housing, meanwhile, remains robust. 'That seems to be the one asset class that is somewhat recession-proof and can navigate through all these cycles,' Freid said. While Related : Many still hold out hope for Advertisement 'There's office parks that have a tremendous amount of land and low density, and you've got all these empty parking fields,' Koop said. 'We absolutely see the opportunity.' Much of Greater Boston's suburban office stock is considered functionally obsolete — not in demand by tenants, too dated to warrant meaningful investment in modernizing. For many suburban offices, tenants that have been in place for decades have either downsized or left entirely. Some 23 percent of office space was available to lease at the end of the year, according to research from brokerage Colliers, the highest rate in more than 20 years. Of course, building new housing, especially apartments, can be a tough sell in many communities. Existing homeowners and residents often push back against any residential proposals, with fears of overrun schools and overflowing sewer lines, or more cars on the streets. Some towns and cities are loath to give up the real estate tax that comes from commercial properties, which are typically taxed at a higher rate than residential. But for a 50-year-old office that has nobody knocking on its door to lease — and with expensive upgrades to building systems that would be necessary to even get a tenant in the door — it's likely that the property's assessed value would decline, ultimately meaning less in tax revenue for the town, said Nick Trocki, senior vice president with Quincy-based Jumbo Capital Inc. 'Our goal is to be able to work with those towns to help them recognize that, but also be able to recoup some of those lost assessed values and real estate tax income,' Trocki said. Advertisement A rendering of the five-story apartment building BXP wants to build at 17 Hartwell Ave. in Lexington. CUBE 3 Trocki has pitched many suburban communities about allowing different real estate uses at what are now vacant commercial offices and empty parking lots. He sees opportunity for more multifamily residential development but acknowledges that changing zoning will take time. 'It's certainly town by town,' Trocki said, adding that there's a surfeit of underutilized commercial property in the suburbs. 'Why wouldn't you allow these overlays to go on top of them?' Developers and others looking for redevelopment opportunity will also find a much less expensive buying environment than the past several years, when the office-to-lab conversion boom inflated the prices of suburban offices. By the end of last year, the average price per square foot for suburban office sales dropped to $124 — less than the average per-square-foot price of $136 reached nearly two decades ago, in the final quarter of 2005, Related : Most of the time, repurposing suburban offices would mean razing the buildings and starting with a flat site. Such projects come with a number of logistical challenges of their own, said Ryan McDonough, chief investment officer at Boston-based real estate firm Marcus Partners. 'You have to understand the site,' McDonough said. 'Is it flat? Is it large enough to accommodate the use you want to put together there?' Both industrial and multifamily uses need more land to spread out on than a traditional office footprint. Zoning is often the most challenging component. Many office building sites do not allow for housing, and convincing communities to change the rules can be a tough sell. Advertisement That challenge was clear for Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, a Boston-based real estate development firm that has pursued multifamily projects in areas the firm thought would comply with the MBTA Communities Act. Chief executive Jay Doherty said the firm has had to cancel some 800 units in communities like Natick, Waltham, and Littleton — at a cost of about $600,000 in predevelopment deposits and design — after the communities 'did not zone near the MBTA stations, or at least did not zone in a way that was useful or feasible for actual development.' In some areas — like the Hartwell Avenue properties in Lexington — there are low-rise office buildings or research and development buildings that would make good candidates for multifamily development, Doherty said — if they can be zoned. 'If they're old enough, and well located, and zoned,' Doherty said. 'If the zoning — particularly MBTA zoning — permits residential development, I can guarantee you someone is going to try it. But there are so few sites.' Catherine Carlock can be reached at
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trust claims $6.13 million jackpot from Megabucks ticket sold in Rockland
A Quincy-based trust has claimed a $6.13 million jackpot won from a Megabucks ticket sold in Rockland. Mega Stars Trust of Quincy claimed the $6.13 million jackpot prize from the Megabucks drawing on Jan. 27, state lottery officials said. The trust, represented by local attorney and trustee David Spillane, chose the cash option on the prize and received a one-time payment of $4,108,675, before taxes. Spillane said the winner plans on putting the winnings towards their children's education. The winning ticket was purchased at Rockland Liquors, 347 Market St. in Rockland. The store receives a $50,000 bonus for its sale of this ticket. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
