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Sunday Smiles – HotAir

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April 19, 2026
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Sunday Smiles – HotAir

Grocery stores of the type we are used to are about a century old and entirely a product of modern technology and capitalism. Before they developed, the delivery and purchase of food were much more labor-intensive for both buyers and sellers. Goods were more dispersed, and storekeepers had clerks to select and bring goods to you. 





Piggly Wiggly invented shopping carts and allowed consumers to pick their own goods, and in the years since, the relentless drive for innovation and efficiency has driven down food costs and expanded consumer choice. It is one of the most competitive industries in the world, with razor-thin profit margins. 

Different stores cater to different consumer desires, with higher-end experiences and higher prices, and stores like Aldi that focus on rock-bottom prices. You have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s on one end, and massive grocery stores like Cub, Kroger, and Meier on the other. There are specialty stores, and stores like Target and Walmart that sell everything from clothes and electronics to filet mignon. 

They all have one thing in common: they can be set up much faster and at much lower cost than Zohran Mamdani’s city-run grocery store. 

Mamdan’s first city-run grocery store isn’t set to open until 2029, at a projected cost of $30 million for a 9,000-square-foot store, which, as you can see, is about 8x the cost per square foot of a Publix. I looked it up, and the cost per square foot of a healthcare facility is about $1000/sq ft.

But when it comes to building a new Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s from the ground up, the costs are much lower, according to a real estate broker who works with prominent grocery chains. Those costs would run at about $800 per square foot, or $7.2 million, for a 9,000-square-foot location.

As for Mamdani’s $30 million shop, according to a grocery store consultant with knowledge of New York development, “no supermarket operator would pay that number.”

“Over $3,000 psf?” the broker emailed. “Someone is making extra vacation money!”

What’s more, the market would have to bring in a whopping $137,000 in daily sales (equivalent to $50 million a year) — which would convert to a roughly $13,000 daily profit — to recoup the $30 million outlay in six years.

That’s an astonishing annual sum, especially because the top five city supermarkets — often with larger footprints — roughly earned between $16 million to $27 million in annual sales in 2025, according to Food Trade News.

The ranking of the top 20 city markets overall for annual sales included familiar names. Key Food notched about $11 million per store, Krasdale scored about $9.4 million per location, ASG Stores — with brands like Associated — also did about $11 million per store. Fine Fare brought in $6.5 million per locale, and Food Bazaar averaged about $20 million per store.





No sane developer would pour that kind of money into a project that will have little to no profits and tie up capital for years before a return is potentially possible. Three years to open a single grocery store. 

Welcome to socialism. Huge costs that go to the mayor’s friends, capital tied up for years until a single taxpayer benefits, and a certain path to failure. 

It’s expensive vaporware. 

Mamdani is all about vaporware. It is what he sells to fund his real ideological projects, most especially the Islamization of New York City. He spends more time denouncing Israel and Jews than doing anything for New Yorkers. 

Expensive projects with promised results years out are a signature for Mamdani. He is pushing for the high-technology innovation of rolling out garbage cans to New Yorkers, and it will only take half a decade to get there from here. 

Raising taxes, though, can happen at lightning speed. You need a lot of money to spread around to your friends, and Mamdani is smart enough to own properties he doesn’t live in all the way out there in Uganda. No New York City taxes on those. 





Mamdani is a great example of a universal truth about socialism: promise a utopia…far into the future. Sell the dream, deliver the nightmare. 

Liberals eat it up. They love words, the emptier the better. 

BEST OF THE BABYLON BEE:









BEST OF THE REST…





AND FINALLY…






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