TEENS OF THE HYDE SQUARE TASK FORCE
Charged with completing a project on a topic of their choice, teens with the Hyde Square Task Force, a youth nonprofit in Jamaica Plain, wanted to dig into food prices.
So, this past spring, the group bought a cart’s worth of items at the Jackson Square Stop &
Shop and found that the purchases at their neighborhood store cost $34 — about 21 percent more than a similar list at a Stop & Shop in suburban Dedham.
While they surveyed a small sampling of the store’s offerings, the five teens most involved with the project — Dereck Medina, Danny Vargas, Emmanuel Vargas, Zaniyah Wade, and Euniss Yoyo — felt the difference hit home, as they’d watched their caregivers struggle to make ends meet. “It’s a tough pill to swallow,” Danny Vargas told me back in May.
At first, Stop & Shop denied the group’s requests to meet about the price differences. “Unfortunately, we cannot respond to all the questions about our operations, products and services that we receive,” a representative wrote in an email that Ken Tangvik, Hyde Square Task Force’s senior manager of organizing and engagement, shared with the Globe this spring.
Regional and national media then flooded the group with interview requests. Community members also reached out, sharing their own negative experiences with the Jackson Square store’s conditions or observations about price differences. And officials ranging from state Attorney General Andrea Campbell to City Councilor Kendra Lara met with the group to discuss its findings.
Stop & Shop later contacted the teens, pointing out that their shopping list incorporated less than 1 percent of the 10,000 products sold in the Jackson Square and Dedham stores, and saying prices at other Boston locations — Roslindale and Hyde Park— were similar to Dedham’s. Stop & Shop has called their report “misleading,” saying it does not consider a neighborhood’s socioeconomic makeup — Dedham skews vastly whiter and wealthier than Jamaica Plain — when setting prices, and instead factors in parameters such as “rent, labor costs, store size, and store offerings.”
The teens acknowledge the limits of their project, but were nonetheless disappointed: “We’re not a research facility, but we were thorough, and we were honest,” Yoyo says.
As of this fall, the group says that the price inequities they spotted remain the same. Members also price-checked 31 items at three additional “inner-city” stores — Grove Hall, Dorchester, and Mission Hill — and found similar differences compared with Dedham.
The group hopes to meet with state lawmakers to consider whether legislation could be introduced on Beacon Hill. “Even with their setbacks, we have still kept going,” Medina says. “You cannot put us back, and you cannot expect us not to fight back.”