Imagine this scenario: Shabbat is about to begin, and you run to your local grocery store for a carton of orange juice. There’s no price tag on it, so only when the cashier rings it up do you realize – it costs $7.99! Now you have a line of other shoppers behind you waiting to check out. You have five seconds to decide: do you suck it up and pay the price, or risk looking like a cheapskate on your walk of shame to place the item back on its shelf?

Yoel Felsen and a group of anonymous Haredi grassroots activists who’ve joined his mission, want to spare people from exactly that type of conundrum. For months, Felsen has been leading an effort called “show the price,” to pressure grocery stores serving Haredi communities to note the price of each item at the point of display, as New York laws require. Despite the laws, Felsen found, not all stores consistently displayed the prices of many goods for sale.

To encourage more stores to be transparent, activists placed an ad in a Boro Park magazine listing local grocery stores where there are price tags on at least 85% of products, including, the ad claims, Breadberry and Rosner’s. The ad also listed one store that did not meet this threshold.

“This campaign is dedicated to fostering positive change within the community by enhancing transparency and convenience at the grocery,” Felsen told Shtetl. “Already, we’ve witnessed positive changes taking place, because this is a grassroot campaign by the community and within the community.”

Laws at both the state and city levels in New York require nearly all grocery stores to display the prices of their goods on the items themselves, or nearby on shelf labels or signs.

Stores found to be violating this law can be charged penalties of between $25 and $50 for each violation.

On the Yiddish-language online forum iVelt, in a thread dedicated to discussing grocery price transparency, users share their frustrations, as well as their purported exchanges with store owners. They cheer each other on for confronting store-owners and celebrate the campaign’s successes.

“My daughter brought home a big oil [bottle] from Gefen that costs $36,” one anonymous user wrote in May. “Had there been price labels, she would have seen that the Schwartz [brand] is a whole $6 cheaper.”

While some have argued that it is difficult for store owners to keep labels accurate as prices change, especially amid the rapid inflation over the past two years, one user asserted that, “If the grocery store owner finds enough time to update the price in the computer, he can find the time to update the product label on the shelf.”

A poll made by a user asked whether customers should ask nicely for transparency or demand it.  Of the 841 responses, 69% favored the confrontational approach.

One iVelt user posted a picture of a shelf full of candle holders from various manufacturers with no prices on them. Only when the user checked the prices one-by-one did they find that they ranged from $1.65 to $3.99, the user claimed.

Another set of posts describes users’ dissatisfaction with price checkers, machines shoppers can use to check the costs of goods by scanning items’ barcodes.

"Price checkers are for managers," one user said, adding “We want the prices on the shelf.”

Another user posted a pair of photos purportedly taken in a supermarket that serves the Haredi community. In one of the photos, a sign says “Price checker by register one.” In the other, a sign above the price checker is shown saying it is “out of order.”

In what one user suggested is a demonstration of the campaign’s success, they posted a picture of an ad from a local supermarket. “All prices are available right on our shelves,” the ad boasted.

Elan Kornblum, publisher of Great Kosher Restaurants, said that customers are less likely to balk at the price of an item once they’re already at the checkout line and an item has been scanned for purchase, and that grocery store owners rely on that tendency. “They know that most people will say, ‘all right, fine, buy it.’”

A lack of price transparency can also lead to customers being overcharged, according to Teresa Murray, a consumer watchdog at the Public Interest Research Group. “I don’t know how many times you’ve been at a store and tried to buy something and the price rings up differently at the register, and you say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s on sale,’ or ‘Wait a minute, that’s not that price; I saw it was this price.’” But if prices aren’t labeled, it’s harder for the customer to know if they’re paying the right price, Murray said.

In South Williamsburg, a Hasidic man who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution expressed support for Felsen’s campaign. “It’s a very good thing,” he said, adding that even though the stores he shops at all show their prices, he’d like to be able to compare prices with other grocery stores. “When I’m in a small supermarket, I don’t know what the other supermarket charges, so it’s good to have these comparisons,” he said.

The “show the price” campaign does have its naysayers. Sruli Goldberg, who runs the deli department at the supermarket The Kosher Hive in Airmont, a town in upstate New York near Monsey, said transparency is important, but claimed that most Haredi grocery stores, including his, are already transparent.

“I don’t think that Yoel Felsen’s campaign is making the supermarkets change,” Goldberg said.