Economists Slam NYC Mayor Mamdani’s $70M Taxpayer-Funded Government Grocery Store Plan as Socialist Disaster.
Americans watching grocery prices climb understand the frustration. A gallon of milk, a pound of ground beef, a bag of rice; you feel it every time you check out. Everything costs more, and paychecks haven’t kept pace. It’s the kind of everyday pain that makes people desperate for answers.
And where there’s desperation, there’s a politician with a plan. When has that ever gone wrong?
Enter New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who just unveiled his big idea: five city-run, taxpayer-funded supermarkets promising a mandatory 30% discount on essential staples like meat, produce, dairy, and bread. The cost to launch? At least $70 million, with taxpayers covering rent and property taxes permanently.
Mamdani took the stage brandishing a plantain and hawking a QR code like a late-night infomercial host — because apparently that’s how you govern now — insisting government price controls are the only cure for corporate “surveillance pricing.”
Economists, to put it mildly, weren’t buying it. As one source noted, from the Daily Wire:
“If a grocery store wants to sell food 30% cheaper, one of only four things must be true:
1) Its suppliers are accepting 30% lower prices. 2) Its workers are accepting 30% lower wages. 3) Taxpayers are covering the difference through subsidies. 4) The store is operating at a loss, and will soon be out of business.”
That’s hedge fund co-founder Vuk Vukovic, and I’d love to hear Mamdani explain which of those four doors he’s choosing. Republican comptroller candidate Joseph Hernandez ran the mayor’s own numbers and found each store would hemorrhage $1.5 million annually: roughly $78 million in combined launch and operating costs in year one, then recurring losses forever. CNBC’s Sara Eisen noted that grocery stores already survive on 1-2% margins. A 30% discount doesn’t create savings. It just moves the bill to you.
Here’s a number City Hall doesn’t want anyone thinking about: that same $70 million could purchase over one million Costco memberships. Immediate relief, zero bureaucracy.
A government-run grocery experiment in Kansas City lost nearly $900,000 in 2024, and still managed to leave shelves bare. Congresswoman Lisa McClain outlined the predictable sequence: subsidized stores undercut private competitors, bodegas and family grocers collapse, the government store becomes the only option, then come shortages and rationing.
“They didn’t solve the hunger problem,” she wrote. “They simply created another Soviet-style bread line.”
Me, I tend to trust the pattern that’s repeated in every socialist experiment over the promises of a man holding a plantain.
This is where it gets personal for me: New York’s bodegas aren’t faceless corporations. They’re families — many of them immigrants who built something from nothing on razor-thin margins.
How exactly are they supposed to compete against a government store that never needs to turn a profit? The Citizens Budget Commission has rightly questioned whether subsidizing groceries for all consumers — not just the food-insecure — is remotely efficient. Of course it isn’t. But efficiency was never the point, was it?
This is ideology wearing compassion’s clothes. The same promise, the same pattern, the same ending. New Yorkers deserve better than a $70 million experiment whose final chapter was written decades ago … in countries their own families fled.
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