Customers Griped About High Grocery Prices. The Grocer Agreed.
The New York Times
After hearing complaints about his prices, a store owner in Brooklyn has apologized, and begun the laborious task of lowering thousands of them.
On Sunday, Young Kim was working in the grocery aisles of Jubilee Marketplace in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, when he overheard some shoppers complaining about the prices. This refrain has been sung around the country since the pandemic, and it wasn’t the first time Mr. Kim, the store’s chief executive, had listened to it.
But that night when he got home, he did something about it.
In a “Dear Greenpoint” letter he posted on Instagram, Mr. Kim wrote, “I just want to say I’m sorry for the high prices and you were right,” modifying “high” with another, more pungent adjective.
After looking around northern Brooklyn to see what other stores charged, he’d decided to match or beat them. He has already dropped prices on thousands of items, he wrote, about 15 percent of what Jubilee sells.
Re-pricing the whole store has become his mission, and he has been out on the floor making the changes for 14 hours every day this week.
“I’m trying to work as fast as I can,” he said. “If you bought a product yesterday and I changed it today, you overspent yesterday.”
