Letters

Big Y

Big Y is a supermarket chain located in Connecticut and Massachusetts. It is owned by the D'Amour family, which built the company after purchasing the original Y Cash Market for $2,500 in 1936. Big Y is one of the largest private companies in the United States with over $1 billion in revenues, nearly 10,000 employees, and over 50 stores.

How It's Used

"To Connecticut dairy farmers, milk is a product that barely fetches a pint-size profit, if any. But for the state's major supermarket chains, it is an excessively lucrative product. That is the conclusion of a new pricing study by the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut.

"The study of the top five supermarket chains that represent 75 percent of the Connecticut market—Stop and Shop, Shaw's, Big Y, Shop-Rite and A&P—revealed that on March 29 the average retail price of brand-name skim, 1 percent, 2 percent and whole milk was $3.11 a gallon. Of that, dairy farmers received $1.04, not nearly enough to cover their costs of about $1.50 a gallon. Processors got about 58 cents for bottling and delivering the milk to stores. After paying the farmers and processors, the chains then added $1.49 to the price of a gallon."

"There are cod and halibut buried in ice in the back of the local Big Y with more warmth than this drive-by handshake between mentor and protégé. You didn't need Dr. Phil to psychoanalyze the postgame moment between Bill Belichick [head coach of the New England Patriots] and Eric Mangini [at the time of the article head coach of the New York Jets] on the 50-yard line. You needed a coroner.”

"It's the oldest trick in the checkout line: Cashiers looking to hook up friends and family with freebies pretend to scan merchandise, but instead slip items into a bag without ever ringing them up at the register. Industry insiders call it 'sweethearting' when employees give away merchandise without charging. It's a problem that costs retailers billions of dollars annually and can drive up the price of products for consumers.

"Now, a Bedford company, StopLift Inc., has devised a way to use computer vision technology to identify sweethearting as it happens. Hannaford Bros. began testing the system a year ago at some of its 160 supermarkets and found up to 20 percent of cashiers were involved in some type of sweethearting. Big Y Supermarkets, which has tested StopLift in a lab during the past three months, plans to try the technology in several stores within a few weeks before installing them at its more than 50 shops."

"Safeway, the fourth-largest U.S. food retailer by sales, has said it wants to market O Organics and Eating Right to other supermarket chains and to aggressively advertise the lines. The Pleasanton, Calif., grocery-store chain, which operates Dominick's, Tom Thumb and other supermarkets in the U.S., is expected to announce Thursday that the two product lines will be sold at 150 ShopRite stores in South Africa and 100 Exito supermarkets in Colombia. Currently, the lines are sold in seven countries, including Taiwan and Mexico.

"In a separate deal that will be announced Thursday, Albertson's LLC will sell O Organics products at 240 of its stores. That deal follows up three regional grocers—Big Y Supermarkets, Price Chopper and Hy-Vee Inc.—signing up to sell Eating Right products."

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