More than 30,000 Stop & Shop employees went back to work Monday in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island after an 11-day strike.
Workers and management reached a tentative agreement that includes wage increases and maintains health coverage.
David Cadden, a professor emeritus at the Quinnipiac University School of Business, said three-quarters of customers chose to shop somewhere else during the strike. And now Stop & Shop has to win those customers back.
“Maybe they went to a Walmart or Aldis and their focus is singularly on price. Other customers might stay with a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s. Or it just may be they had an antipathy to the idea of the staff having a strike at all.”
The strike overlapped with the shopping period for Easter and Passover. Cadden says Stop & Shop lost about $2 million a day during the strike – which could be around 5 percent of their annual revenue.
