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.”
As in much of the city, the high cost of living is an obsession in Greenpoint. In the Democratic mayoral primary last month, Zohran Mamdani, who has made affordability the main theme of his campaign, won 75 percent of the vote in the neighborhood.
So it is no surprise that residents, when they talk about Jubilee, tend to focus on two themes: The $2.75 smashburger in the street-level cafe is ridiculously cheap, and almost everything on the shelves downstairs is ridiculously expensive. One of several threads on the second point in the Greenpoint forum on Reddit is titled “Grocery Prices at Jubilee are Offensive.”
Mr. Kim is proud of the burger, made with beef from cattle fed entirely on grass. The grocery prices, though, had been bothering him for months before his public apology.
Recently, he said, he and a manager went shopping at a nearby chain store. Prices on most of the 20 or so items they bought were 50 cents to $1 less than Jubilee’s — not so outrageous, they thought at first. When they got to the checkout, though, their total was about $30 lower than if they’d gone to their own store.
“That’s a number that you can’t really ignore,” he said.
Mr. Young’s solution is unconventional, but the problem he’s trying to tackle afflicts almost all independent stores, including a location of Jubilee in the city’s financial district: competing with big chains that have the muscle to extract lower prices from wholesalers and the deep pockets to absorb some of the pressure of inflation, tariffs and skittish, increasingly cost-sensitive shoppers.
Jubilee’s high prices were a result of simple math. A flat markup, “anywhere from 30 to 50 percent,” depending on the item, Mr. Kim said, was tacked onto the amount the store paid wholesalers. The system was straightforward, but it made Jubilee seem punishingly expensive in the company of Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s and other nearby chains.
Independent supermarkets typically compete with big national companies through short-term sales on a limited number of items. Few owners attempt to re-price their entire inventory for the long term, said Laura Strange, a spokesperson for the National Grocers Association, a trade group for independent supermarkets.
“If you think about the labor alone, to get in and do the analyzing of the numbers and then changing prices throughout the store, it’s a really large undertaking,” she said.
Jubilee stocks somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 different items — Mr. Kim wasn’t exactly sure of the number when I caught up with him by the refrigerated yogurt case on Wednesday afternoon. At that moment, he was too focused on putting a new $6.99 shelf label on Lifeway’s organic kefir, $2 less than it had cost in the morning, to think about larger numbers. He did know that he’d embarked on an enormous project that would take weeks to complete as he spot-checked every item in the store against competitors’ websites and the apps Mercato and Instacart.
By that point, the produce aisles and butcher counter had already been reformed. A box of four organic peaches from Frog Hollow Farm is now $6.99, down a few dollars from the old price. Rotisserie chickens had come in for a lot of flak when Jubilee sold them for almost $7 a pound. Now an entire bird is $5, less than it costs the store to prepare. A sticker on their plastic cartons identifies them as Apple Brined Five Buck Cluck.
“That’s kind of my apology to the community for not listening,” Mr. Kim said.
Rob Martinez, who produces a series of video interviews with the owners of small food businesses around the city, said Jubilee’s burger was cheap because Mr. Kim wanted to sell a meal as affordable to neighborhood parents as White Manna’s burgers had been for his mother and father when he was growing up near Hackensack, N.J.
“That’s just his mission, to make Jubilee affordable and feed families,” Mr. Martinez said.
Whether the same logic can be applied to the entire store without putting Jubilee out of business is unclear.
“I don’t know if he fully understands the consequences,” Mr. Martinez said. “I assume he does.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
The post Customers Griped About High Grocery Prices. The Grocer Agreed. appeared first on New York Times.
