Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for city-owned grocery stores came into sharper focus on Monday after he announced the stores would heave prices 30% “below typical retail prices” on a “core basket of goods.”
“No exceptions, no gimmicks,” Mamdani promised Monday at a Campaign Against Hunger event in East New York. Spoiler: There’s no hunger to speak of in NYC. Poverty remains a leading indicator of obesity.
Guess where Mamdani plans to build his first 30%-under-retail city-run grocery store.
Or I could just tell you. The first Bane Grocers (I made up the name) will open next year in The Peninsula in Hunts Point, in the South Bronx. The plan is to open four more, one in each borough’s poorest neighborhood.
The really fun part is that bodegas are particularly dense in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, serving areas that big grocery stores would rather not. These are mom and pop operations getting by on razor-thin profit margins of about 2%.
The solution to the city’s problem with its abundant and efficient grocery supply system (yes, you read that correctly) is to introduce city-run stores to undercut the abundant and efficient bodegas in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Despite their small size, bodegas operate just like any other grocery or convenience store. They sell staples at maybe a breakeven price, hoping shoppers will splurge on higher-markup items like Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs cereal for the kids and a liter of Coke. They don’t make enough money to stay in business selling quarter gallons of milk.
What happens to bodegas when customers start going to Bane’s because they can get that same quart of milk for for $1.20 or so instead of $1.75? For starters, the bodegas can devote less precious fridge space to milk, or stop selling it altogether. Then maybe they watch those boxes of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs gather dust.
“The only reason to shop at a city-run store — which, if they’re like anything else the city runs, will be poorly managed and with customer service moving at Glacier Speed — is if they undercut the competition with subsidized prices,” I predicted just three weeks ago. That’s when the New York Post talked to bodega owners who claimed that Julie Su, Mamdani’s deputy mayor for “economic justice,” demanding to know what their best-selling items were, and what their markup was.
If selling staples at 30% under market price puts bodegas out of business, Mamdani may very well engineer an actual problem — a scarcity of small local grocers. Less selection, too, as South Bronx shoppers find themselves having to make the longer trip to city-run Bane’s.
If you’ve ever been to a state-run liquor store, you don’t need me to tell you about state-run selections. You’ll be allowed to choose from what they think you should choose from.
The New York Post interviewed locals who had “questions about how the discount would work, what few items they’d have to choose from, and how much it would cost taxpayers to subsidize the lefty mayor’s scheme.”
But this is maybe my favorite part of Monday’s sharp focus. While the city will own Bane Grocers, the city won’t run it. Instead, as the Post reported, Mamdani “put out a request for proposals to private grocery chains to run the stores, asking potential bidders to estimate the figure themselves through an annual ‘Affordability Payment’ to cover the losses from selling below retail prices.”
Translation: Taxpayers will subsidize Big Grocery to help put mom & pop bodegas out of business, and make the city’s poorest residents more dependent on Big Government than ever.
“In the end, it all costs more, and you get less,” Juan Carlos Santiago — a refugee from Communist Cuba — told the paper about the life he escaped. “Thank God, here you can go to another store. Thank God!”
But for how much longer?
Recommended: DSA’s Solemn Vow: We Win an Election, You Lose a Country.
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