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Culture War yes/no? I'm not going to have a long post here, since I am more genuinely asking questions about how this is supposed to work, but: Mayor Mamdani's grocery stores. Good idea or disaster waiting to happen?
My own, very damn subjective, view on this is that they'll turn out to be a typical boondoggle/pork barrel project for NYC internal politics, and that most of whatever funding available will go on paying baksheesh to vested interests, giving reward positions to party loyalists placed in charge of administering the scheme, and once Mamdani is out of office, these places will shut up shop (literally) and be empty commercial sites that made no real difference in the long run.
This is even before we get into all the interesting and varied possibilities of fraud and gaming the system.
I see that
heone of his administration announced the necessity for ID cards so non-NYC residents can't load up on cheap groceries, which would seem to indicate thathe'sthey are notatotal fools and do have some awareness of how things can go wrong, but also given the protesting about requiring ID for voting and how this places a disproportionate burden on marginalised communities, how will he square the circle of "this is to serve marginalised communities but also we want ID"? If the anti-ID lot claim that requiring ID will not, for example, prevent voter fraud then how can requiring ID prevent grocery fraud? People who can't manage to get a driver's licence will manage to get a "library card-esque" ID?Also I understand that these stores will be run by private operators and hoo-boy. Worst of both worlds? I think this article (from an Irish person) points out the problems there, and anyone who has worked in retail will have a good idea of the kinds of problems that will be faced: shoplifting, union jobs (with corresponding high wages and good conditions, which will drive up costs and require a ton of the city government pumping in funding) or minimum-wage jobs?, challenging IDs for non-native New Yorkers, people buying the cheap staples then reselling them (as with loose cigarettes), what if the marginalised communities don't want fruit and veg, they want cigarettes, booze, soda and chips? and the likes:
I disagree with the article about this being stealth socialism, but I do agree that this is a vanity project that will not survive Mamdani's term in office. It probably would be better to encourage Aldi/Lidl to set up stores in these areas for their cheap staples proven model, and if they don't want to/can't get to set up in such places, I think it would be a good idea to consider why not and what that means for the state-run grocery stores:
People like to talk about how shoplifting from big chain stores isn't really theft because insurance covers all that and they make millions in profit, but such big chains make those profits by ruthless pricing and enforcing economies of scale and using their clout to pressure suppliers for discounts. Unless it is going to be the likes of Walmart operating one city-owned grocery store in each borough (and why would they even bid for such small potatoes outfits?) then the enforced "30% below market prices" will have to be made up elsewhere, and that will most likely be on: minimum-wage staff, fewer staff, mark-ups on the other items that are not the mandated staples, and finding some way around the limitation on "no hot food, lottery tickets, alcohol or cigarettes". Maybe Aldi or Lidl will snap these up as opportunities to grow brand loyalty in these areas? I dunno!
We'll see how it works out. I'm not sanguine, but somebody tell me how this could work if done properly?
I think it’s a good idea. NYC is filled with people who make money unscrupulously and then waste that money on consumerist nonsense. There are financiers invested in gambling apps and predatory youth sports leagues and I want to see them punished. IMO all of their money should be taken away and given to the productive classes, so taxing them and then translating that into less expensive staple foods is a cool idea. Also, it does seem that “healthy essential foods” typically have a high profit margin, some exceeding 30%.
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Grocery stores are famously low profit. Like 1 to 3 percent after ruthlessly optimizing logistics and having minimal staffing. There's no 30 percent laying around for someone to take. Market prices are the price for a reason.
These are going to run at a 30%+ loss given even slightly higher than typical staffing costs. Which is feasible by subsidizing with tax dollars. The cynic in me suspects this will be yet another exercise in setting tax dollars on fire. Optimistically some poor people will get some below cost food that they eat rather than resell.
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The main reasoning I see here is food deserts but the large majority of food deserts are functionally a myth due to outdated standards around transportation. They do exist in some places still (there's a mountain I hike at where the closest food besides dollar general is like 45 minutes away) but the majority of them are just because people drive now. I live in an area very close to being a suburban "food desert" and no one would ever know it because everyone has cars.
NYC might be an exception since car ownership is rarer there, but it makes up for it with better public transit so presumably there's still not much trouble with actually accessing food if you take a short bus ride or the subway or whatever.
But ok there might be a few people who truly are in need and if we want to subsidize them, fine. We do that with the mail, we deliver even to super rural locations that are obviously not worth the price. Charity doesn't have to be profitable. But charity should get results and these grocery stores are going to be a mess, they're not targeted to those rare people actually in need. Delivering mail to rurals at a loss actually gets mail to rurals, will these grocery stores actually provide food to those who would have to travel long distances otherwise or will they just be at a loss for nothing? And if they're not guaranteed to be at a loss that that's an issue because that means the market could have solved the problem to begin with and was just handicapped by government.
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Isn't the profit margin of grocery chain stores quite low in reality? At least a common complaint over here in Finland is that the local pseudo-duopoly makes them ridiculously more profitable than is the norm in other countries because they typically don't face any real price competition.
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I think it is mainly doomed because it starts with a bad analysis of "the problem".
There are things called food deserts, sure, but why? New York is one of the wealthiest cities in the world, even the poor are extremely wealthy by global standards. Go to just about any Asian city and you don't have to look hard for fresh anything, cooked anything, etc. There are markets all over.
New York doesn't allow open air markets, so that doesn't help. But there are still plenty of shops everywhere. Why aren't the shops selling a bunch of fresh ingredients?
Put yourself in the mind of a poor New Yorker. You've just acquired a bunch of fresh ingredients for cooking. Now take them back to your apartment. Your tiny, shitty apartment, with multi decade old cooking appliances, lack of cookware, and then when you finish out how to microwave the meal to completion you can serve them on your non-existent dishes and wash those non-existent dishes by hand in your sink because you don't have a working dish washer. Do we all see the problem? You have to be rich to afford a nice enough place to cook for yourself in New York. Even giving away food for free will not solve this problem.
The food deserts exist because of a lack of demand. And even giving away free food won't be enough to get poor New Yorkers cooking their own healthy food.
They buy snacks, easy microwave meals, and takeout food. If you can make all of those things more healthy without increasing their price you might be able to get more New Yorkers actually eating healthy.
But why do you even want them eating healthy? Is it because you want them to be less obese and more healthy? Well good news, we have a solution for that, they are called GLP-1s. Just subsidize them and hand em out like candy to New Yorkers. Or have bodegas sell them.
In conclusion Mamdani's end goals are attainable. He has just chosen to go about it in a roundabout and silly way that will accomplish nothing.
I've lived in a large city pretty much my entire adult life so far (mercifully I'm moving out in a couple of months), one that is not unlike NYC in a lot of ways. I don't think this is that much of a real problem. Most apartments in those cities have at least a stove/oven. In most of those cities, old unkillable appliances that are decades old but still very functional are in circulation and if you know a few people you can generally get one for free (if you supply the labor of moving it) or very cheap. If not, you can get a cheap single burner resistive cooktop, I see one for 15$CAD on walmart from a brand (not a good brand, but a brand). You can probably get one cheaper in a pawn shop, or if you take a trip to chinatown and look around the stores there. The small, cramped, cluttered stores especially. Pots, pans, utensils, plates, again go to Chinatown and check the stores there. I'd bet for 10$ you can leave with a pot and a pan and at least one plate and one set of utensils. Or a dollar store will have some. If you want better quality, head to a thrift store and get a second hand one. As for doing dishes, I've lived 20 years without a dishwasher, it's fine really. My guess is that the entire set of what you need to cook a basic meal can be had for under 50$. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get all of it under 40$. A cooktop (portable if need be), one pot, one pan, a stirring spoon, a spatula, a cooking knife (doesn't need to be chef's knife), a plate, a bowl, a fork, knife and spoon.
The problem, and I agree there is a problem and it's not the availability of fresh food, is motivation management. Ultimately cooking is, most days for most people, not motivating. There's other things they would rather be doing, and if there isn't they likely have little energy left after their day to put into it. I don't want to say the poor are uniquely lazy, it's not that simple. I'm pretty lazy quite often too. But poor people live in an environment that doesn't help them be very motivated either. Some people are uniquely self-motivated; great for those people, even if they start at the very bottom of the economic ladder, they tend to be able to climb up a few rungs over their lifetime and that's great. Most people aren't like that. They need to have grown up in a good nurturing environment that kept them focused on doing annoying things even if they are annoying to do to keep doing it as an adult. If when you were young your parents (if you're lucky enough to have grown up with both of them) worked double-shifts at the depression and alcoholism factory, your chances aren't great.
I guess mileage may vary. I have not lived in a large city like that. The friends that I had who lived there had all those complaints. And maybe yes it doesn't take much to do a setup to allow for cooking. But it is a one time hurdle that still has to be jumped over, so I'd at least add it to the behavior stack.
I had been about to write a whole thing about the hassle of cooking. I ran out of time and wrapped up the comment. So I heavily agree with you. I have a family of 5 and I am the primary cook in the house. We still end up eating out 2 to 7 times a week (I know that is a big variance, but lots of variance in my life right now). The home cooked meals are as simple and time saving as I can make them. I'm throwing pasta in a big pot, putting pre-breaded frozen chicken in an air fryer, and using microwave ready vegetable packs. And sometimes I'm skipping those second two things. On the harder side sometimes I am making meal kits from hello fresh that take like 1.5 hours. I'm trying to make this as easy on myself as possible and it is still a huge mental strain and stressor all week every week. At this moment I am typing this comment rather than figuring out what I'm gonna do for dinner tonight since the fridge is barren. I do actually enjoy cooking and making things, but that is something i want to do once or twice a week when I have lots of spare time.
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It may work to bluntly reduce obesity, but that's just fiddling with calories. It doesn't replace an actually healthy diet with fewer harmful additives, more varied vitamins and proteins, etc.
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I seem to recall reading that expectations of home cooking vary a lot, and that in big Asian cities (Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo) in particular home cooking isn't the norm. But those cities have relatively affordable, quick restaurant options. But last I checked, that isn't really an affordable option in NYC (uncertain about Europe). It's at least worth considering if that could be an option in the West.
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Speaking of "food deserts", the New Yorker of all outlets decided to run a piece a week ago countering the common complaints from the usual suspects about them: https://archive.is/20260727102910/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/03/food-justice-undone-hanna-garth-book-review
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The way I see this going is for it to end up being a giant shoplifting subsidization scheme. If there's no profit motive, none of the employees or managers have any reason to care about shoplifting, and any politician who doesn't want to be seen as an alt-right fascist isn't going to want to crack down on it either. I expect the shelves to be emptied out by looters just brazenly and without even trying to hide it walking in, loading up bags, and walking out, leaving the store barren and useless until the next time it restocks. This is just going to be a massive welfare scheme that siphons taxes into the pockets of thieves.
There is not a lot of shoplifting prevention motive at other stores either. After a frustrating Amazon return experience, I told a WF employee I was just going to go steal some ingredients because Bezos owed me. They said that was fine, so I did it.
There's still some limit. There can't not be, because money comes from somewhere and capitalists gonna capitalist. Stores that take fewer losses than it would cost to hire security mostly don't bother. Some stores do hire security (There's a Walmart near me that we call Ghettomart because it's in a poor neighborhood and sees all sorts of poor people, and has security guards near the front). Stores that take enough losses to outweigh their profits close down, because they're not profitable. Not arresting the criminals and doing literally nothing isn't the same, the closing down is just a lot more subtle and less obviously connected to the crime from the outside.
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Now this is a real question: is it ethical to shoplift from Whole Foods to collect on a debt if Amazon owes you money and refuses to pay?
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The scheme is basically it will be a private grocery store whose land costs are covered by the government and in response they must offer certain items 30% discounted.
So the operator has an incentive to avoid shop lifters. But the operator also has an incentive to minimize the supply of the 30% discounted items.
Hmmm. Okay so it won't endlessly funnel taxes into shoplifter, it will just go out of business due to shoplifting and/or vandalism for the same reason all the other grocery stories in the area did (as far as I can tell that's the main reason food deserts occur).
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So it's just going to be a giant misuse of public funds operation, like New York seems content to produce without stop for centuries now?
Nothing ever happens, truly.
Yep
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It will be interesting to see if the Mamdani administration prefers shortages, or if they prefer lines. Each way has its pros and cons.
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This has been predicted sufficiently often that I predict that the NYC government will be prepared with defenses to prevent this. A politician can't be seen cracking down on this shoplifting due to the optics, but a politician can still crack down on it without being seen, and Mamdani certainly has a great incentive to crack down on such shoplifting. It would have to just be organized by a politician's orders by private citizens who have no credible link to the politician or his associates or to any organization, and it would have to be performed far away enough from the marts such that journalists can't get bad-looking photos, or journalists would have to be kept sufficiently away. An informal perimeter around each mart where private citizens police both journalists and the types of people who seem likely to loot seem like a decent solution for any sufficiently charismatic politician who wants to create the perception of these marts succeeding.
And that's just me spitballing; I'm sure a real politician who has real experience with power and optics and the time and incentives to use them could come up with better methods for cracking down on the looting while avoiding the bad optics.
In New York these people are called thé guardian angels and they’re loyal to Curtis Sliwa, an opponent of Mamdani.
Average age of a Guardian Angel: 73 years old.
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Huh, Mamdani may be laying down the groundwork for the source material of a modernized 21st century remake of Gangs of New York.
And here I was expecting Escape from New York.
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Interesting proposal, a squad of goons operating in a legal gray area re: the state’s monopoly on violence, for the purpose of abetting the political fortunes of an avowed socialist. Pink-ertons, if you will.
Here, take this groan of approbation!
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... I don’t think AAQC's are appropriate for puns, but damn that was good.
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If I were Mamdani I would let shoppers mob the store and simply make them do it in a semi-"controlled" way. The rush just prove what demand there is for State Grocery and how we need to expand the program, what a huge success. This argument will work on exactly the people it needs to work on.
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None of the employees in any normal store have any reason to care about it, either, other than the threat of losing their jobs for not tackling it, which is unchanged here. Their wages aren't based on profits the store makes.
Plenty of low level employees do care, in the sense of "Fuck you, I have to do this shit to get my stuff. Why should your defectbot ass get it for free?"
The employees who don't have that attitude are usually the ones getting let go within a few months.
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It is changed, in the owner cares, the owner hires the manager presumably putting pressure on him to care. The problem with the public sector is that especially for people who don't live next to them, these issues are so diffuse voters don't care enough to vote across ideology. Until things get very very bad, at which point the solution can end up being the equivalent of a shock treatment. So the "manager" rarely gets pressure to care.EDIT: Someone pointed out as a response elsewhere in the thread the operators of the store still would care about profitability, then in this case yeah, disregard my comment.
The usual defence of shoplifting is that stores price in shrinkage. So if the NYC city administration is going to be paying for all this, then the for-profit operators can just pass the costs of the shoplifting on to them. Certainly, if I were going to sign a contract for this, I'd be sure to load all or as much of the liability onto the city as I could get away with.
If stores price in shrinkage then that just means the shoplifter is stealing from their neighbor who does not shoplift and is paying 3% more because you are stealing.
Honestly seems worse to me. Better to steal from evil corp than your neighbor John. And economics would tend to indicate you are stealing from John.
Yes, all shoplifting is theft from the community. But that's a second order consequence, so it's functionally inscrutable High Arcana to the people who need to hear it.
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I think it's great. As policy it's terrible, but it's the kind of local experimentation we should encourage. Then, if and when it's a disaster, it's a useful data point for people to point to.
Food deserts are kind of a meme, but I can agree that it's on the whole good to make sure every place has a nearby convenient grocery store to do conventional shopping and create low skill jobs, even if uneconomic. The fix for that is targeted tax exemptions that will be credibly maintained for a long time and a greater level of police presence. This isn't too different from Mamdani's proposal, except it's more open to any entrant and is still subject to a lightened market discipline.
The thing with having an advanced society is having technocratic government that is efficient and knows what works and what does not work. And this idea in our technocracy is solidly in the does not work camp. I don’t think you should say old failed ideas can never be tried again but you shouldn’t do that very often. The point of education is to develop best practices.
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I suppose the initial five stores are the pilot scheme to see how it goes, but if he really wants to help the hard-pressed lower-income families, then there needs to be way more than five and a lot of thought into "who runs this exactly, how much will it cost exactly, will it bring jobs to the local area, and what goods will be sold there exactly?" No good selling discounted carrots and heads of cabbage if nobody wants to buy them. Cheap(er) eggs and milk, yeah that could work, but prices there are being shoved up by general costs of production. So mandating that "30% below market prices" means either (a) markups on the non-mandated staples or (b) the city makes up the difference, which whoo, that could come to a pretty penny.
Aldi and Lidl seem to be expanding in NYC so that demonstrates that it can be done and that there's a market, I'm curious as to what exactly Mamdani's city-owned stores are supposed to be doing. Will they be even cheaper than the discount stores? What is the plan?
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I don't think sympathetic media, to the extent that they are able, would treat it as a useful example. It might get reported if it fails, but it'd probably be treated in an isolated way rather than in a general sense that "these ideas don't really work."
Outlets won't even have to lie to defend it either because there will always, always be an external cause ready for use that places the blame elsewhere. The defense will always write itself. "The idea was good, the conditions were wrong."
That wasn't Real Communal Groceries!
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It doesn't work this way. The official results of the policy are whatever the "experimenters" wish it to be. We saw this with the Seattle minimum wage (study showed disaster, official results are it's great) and plastic bag bans in NJ and CA (studies by proponents showed more plastic waste, not less, no relaxation of bans contemplated) for instance. Experimentation with a priori dumb shit is only good if we're going to get accurate results and act on them. Otherwise, "experimentation" is just an excuse to do obviously dumb shit.
My prediction is that one of two things will happen by August 4, 2029:
It will have been cancelled without implementation because of all the obvious issues with it. Key point here is the cancellation: this prediction encompasses it being cancelled because of all the wreckers/Trump/whatever.
It will go ahead as planned, run into all the issues, and it will be widely perceived as a failure, after a long stream of articles by the Post etc. The national mainstream media will mostly memory hole it, but no one will bring it up as a Mamdani success. There will be no other major cities that will create Mamdani-style groceries.
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maybe the outcome is that nobody bids and mamdami blames those lousy capitalists
Somebody will bid, even if it's a company the DSA spins up to do it.
Oh dear trying to imagine DSA leftists running a grocery store when they cant manage a coffee shop…
I am tempted to link that infamous clip of the DSA convention where, genuinely God bless the girl doing the moderating, she had the patience of Job dealing with the, um, diverse and inclusive set of members making contributions to the discussion.
"I'm sorry, the comrade on till 3 has been triggered by their sensory issues and the use of gendered language, so we will be closing down that cash register until further notice. If you are not using the self-service checkout, kindly identify yourself with your preferred pronouns when paying by library card".
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I don't know if it's a disaster waiting to happen, I would venture probably funding and some glazing arcicles can paper over a failure for as long as the media feels like they should support this (as long as keeping the socialists on-side against Trump). Maybe excessively fund one or two nicer ones, potemkin grocery stores if you will, so the media can go and film reports there about what a success it is.
There are domains where the question of whether private vs public is better not fully resolved, or at least where there are significant zone of shadow, ambiguity or compromise. Healthcare, public security, etc... Grocery stores and food supply is not one of them. Grocery stores is an issue that has been thoroughly adjudicated during the Cold War and capitalism has been found to win it so overwhelmingly that within the lore it's a large contributor to the end of the Soviet Union (you know the one, the 80s story about Yelstin's visit to a random American grocery store). Food availability, distribution, accessibility across the socioeconomic spectrum has been found to be massively better in market economies compared to command economies. That market works about as efficiently as anyone could hope. If private operators are unwilling to serve a specific market, it's not because they are unwilling to take meager profits or because poor people's money is icky, it's because there are not profits to be made at all for some reason. There are grocery stores in some really horrible neighborhoods, and if it was possible to run them profitably in some other horrible neighborhoods, someone would. As you mention, they need to consider and fix why some places just aren't profitable to run a grocery store in. Throwing public money at the issue is not going to fix it.
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Average gross margins for grocery stores in NYC is 1,6% on total revenue of around $50 billion a year. The proposed stores should offer unachievable 30% discount with revenue of around $50 million, one thousandth of overall grocery store market volume. It cannot work for a problem at hand, it is not designed to do it.
If he is smart, then he will offer some selected number of discounted goods with limited volume per person as with normal shops who use this tactic to attract buyers. He can then make photo ops of happy customers, while the rest of the store will be competitively priced in order to prevent empty shelves and related PR disaster. It will work splendidly for the main purpose: Generate positive PR and reward people in his circle who will be involved in this money hog.
That's my cynical take on it, but you all know my stony, cold, black, wizened heart 😁
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What Mandami's grocery stores point out most is the total control he and the DSA have over the narrative. The press absolutely loves all this, whereas would a Republican or even Eric Adams try it, they'd be 24/7 hating on it.
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How command economies with fixed price levels actually work is shortages- there’s simply none of whatever item is popular and unprofitable available. Grocery net profit isn’t high enough for this to be a short list, either- thé grocery stores will feature lots of empty shelves.
The opposite is true from a different vantage point. All businesses that aren’t ran horizontally are essentially command economies from the top.
I can also relate a different experience of my own back when I was younger and was an assistant manager at a local pharmacy/grocery store. Because vendors paid us to house their products and paid an additional premium for front row shelving space (this is what happens at virtually every grocery store you will ever go to), when the advertisement papers for the month went out to customers at the front of the store, pressure is put on all of us to upsell the customer on all the particular items resellers paid a spot in the advert for. Well, this is where one day things got interesting…
Naturally not every item that goes on sale or gets heavily promoted sells. Depending on what sells how much and when and where, products can easily get pushed into the background, cause price fluctuations or become delisted entirely. Anyway, there was another local store of ours that was being managed and the product was grossly underachieving its target for the month early on, based on their estimates. Well I came up with an idea to pair it with a different item we had that was about to go on sale (different from the ad sheet), create a table for it and sell it as a combo. It worked so unbelievably well it lost the store money. We sold out so quickly, huge amounts of customers were coming in and asking for rain checks on the item at it’s on-sale price, even after the sale had ended because our inventories couldn’t keep up. I ended up getting into trouble for that. One of the few times in my life I executed a task so well it actually completely backfired on me. My argument back to our director was that this came more as a failure of our policy when it came to honoring rain checks than it did as a sales pitch. Our task was to sell the item and you can bet your ass that I sold that item alright. Though when I was processing our paperwork for the month and was reviewing the numbers for everything I definitely scratched my head and spent considerable time reviewing things and said to myself “how in the fuck did this happen?…”
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Good idea, but needs little tweaking. The perfect, universally popular bipartisan compromise would be:
Nation wide federal government owned grocery stores, selling only Israeli products.
You will eat hummus made of apartheid and genocide, and you will like it.
Mamdani Marts where all products are legally mandated to be sourced from Israeli companies at a cost that guarantees those companies profit would be so hilarious that I want to see it happen, US Constitution be damned. Bonus points if the buyer ID program is modified to only allow verified, practicing, devout Muslims to be buyers.
"I will never eat bugs!"
"Not even Israeli bugs? Why are you so anti-semitic?"
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If you are the private operator, you have a strong incentive to ensure there are frequently shortages with respect to the 30% discounted items.
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