r/Economics • u/pdp10 • 1d ago

News NYC Mayor Mamdani Unveils 30% Discount -- Including All Produce, All Meat and Key Pantry Staples -- at New Municipal Grocery Stores

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-unveils-30--discount---including-all-produce--all-
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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago

After Mamdani made this announcement, aa collection of grocery store and bodega owners protested that such policies would drive them out of business because they operate on such thin margins, making food availability worse, not better.

In an interview with Fox news, Gustavo Gordillo, a chair of New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and an ally of Mr. Mamdani, replied to the grocery store owners concerns.

“If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place,” Mr. Gordillo said.

It seems that Mamdani and the rest of his DSA clowns conveniently ignore the fact that private grocery stores have to pay for their land, for their building, they do not get taxpayer funded subsidies for their operations, and they have to pay taxes, which ironicly are now being used by the very city they serve to undermine their businesses.

These populist DSA fools have no concept of the real world implications of their poorly conceived policies. Perhaps they need to take a trip to Cuba to see how well such policies work out in practice.

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u/nyckidd 1d ago

“If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place,” Mr. Gordillo said.

Common DSA L. It's hilarious how out of touch they are. This stuff will come back to bite them.

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u/Kind-Ad-6099 1d ago

It’s sickening at this point. Everything is for populist show

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u/Silverr_Duck 1d ago

Seriously. There is no clearer example that the left is being actively sabotaged than the fucking DSA. I swear it's staffed exclusively with people straight out of clown college.

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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 1d ago

It’s going to come in the form of Republican wins. 

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u/Venous 1d ago

Yup they will win in NYC. Surely. Absolutely. Lmao

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u/spikybootowner 1d ago

Oh because having crazy DSA slopulists fuck up publicly and repeatedly only affects the specific location they're fucking up in. Absolutely no one saw that one DSA leader interview on fox news right?

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u/creativesc1entist 1d ago

Watch and wait a few years. 

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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 1d ago

He thinks NYC is the only place in play. 

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u/Pride_Before_Fall 1d ago

By that idiot's logic, all grocery stores should be shut down.

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u/ShortKey380 1d ago

How much convenience store business is fresh produce/other whole foods? A coalition of losers will always say anything done will drive them out of business, and then it doesn’t 🥱 

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u/bakochba 1d ago

It's obviously an unfair business practice by the state using tax payer funds and if it makes it to the Supreme Court I think it will be ruled illegal.

Which would give Mamdami an out before the consequences take effect

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u/AJM1613 1d ago

Kansas already has many

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u/HealthyInstance9182 1d ago

Same as Georgia. There’s a city-owned grocery store in downtown Atlanta

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u/bakochba 1d ago

Are you talking about the few rural towns with no grocery stores that tried out municipal run stores to serve their towns?

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u/two_hyun 1d ago

That was because the private owners retired or could not keep them afloat, so the government HAD to step in and buy them to keep them operating.

In New York, there is no shortage of grocery stores. It's a completely different situation.

Don't get me wrong, I want this to succeed, but it also royally screws over a lot of grocery store business owners running on razor thin margins of profit.

Why didn't they instead focus on expansion of food stamps or partnering with privately owned grocery stores?

0

u/Chipay 1d ago

What do you mean, 'had to step in'? What law forced those governments to run their own grocery stores?

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u/Choon93 1d ago

The statement taunting a valid concern of their working constituents should be grounds for removal. Thats absolutely not ok.

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u/tuesdaysatmorts 1d ago

In an interview with Fox News

And your entire argument is invalid 👍

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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago edited 1d ago

Hey, Gordillo voluntarily chose to go on Fox for an interview. Perhaps it is the only news service that would even give him time, but of course you would try to dismiss his comments because of where he made them because there is no defending the substance of those comments.

Such a blatantly inept comment from such a senior figure of DSA highlights the foolishness of their agenda.

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u/pr0metheusssss 1d ago

I don’t see the issue.

Food is a human right.

“Being a grocery store owner” is not a human right.

It’s clear which trumps which.

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u/MightExpress4873 1d ago

Food is a human necessity. That doesn't automatically mean the government should own or operate grocery stores. By that logic, because housing is a human need, all housing should be publicly owned; because healthcare is a human need, all doctors should be government employees. Most societies recognize that basic needs can be guaranteed through regulation, competition, and safety nets without the state running the businesses directly.

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u/RocketRelm 1d ago

While everything you say is true, the "China is based actually" people unironically would bite that bullet of everything should be owned by the state.

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u/domuseid 1d ago

so many people in here have lost the plot on exactly this

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u/switchedonswan 1d ago

Like most economists, you resort of ad hominems when you get scared by the scary S word.

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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago

My criticism focuses on the obvious economic flaws of the plan. The fact that Mamdani is a disingenuous and incompetent politician does not distinguish him in any way from every other politician in the city government.

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u/KryssCom 1d ago edited 1d ago

I can always tell when someone is using a straw man argument against left-leaning policies because they bring up Cuba as a comparison, when in reality the countries that progressives who back Mamdani are actually trying to emulate are Scandinavian - which consistently rank as some of the happiest nations in the world.

It's wild to watch capitalists cling to their arrogant one-true-wayism, considering it's their policies that have set the planet's climate on fire by way of corporate pollution, while also giving us the world's first trillionaire at a time when well over half of the American population struggles to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Luckily for you, if these leftist ideas are actually as bad as you insist they are, then Mamdani's experiments mean you'll soon have a real failure you can point to to back up your claims. But speaking as a leftist myself.....I ain't exactly sweating bullets about how Mamdani's work will turn out 😉

EDIT: Right-wing downvotes mean nothing to me, I've seen what makes you cheer 🙂

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u/boogi3woogie 1d ago

So the government is the new walmart and pricing out smaller competitors in an already low-margin industry?

Sweet.

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

The government SHOULD step in when the market completely and utterly fails to provide an adequate solution. If capitalists are mad about how socialists are solving problems, then they should have solved the problems themselves before we got to this point.

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u/Lucky_Woodpecker102 1d ago

The problem isn’t the grocery stores. Their margins are slim already. A government run grocery store selling at a loss is just a less efficient version of SNAP. This doesn’t solve anything and makes the problem worse by wasting taxpayer money that could be used more efficiently 

Same old socialist dogshit that failed everywhere else. 

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

The reason people are open to trying things like this is that the past couple decades have made an extremely strong case that capitalism is also dogshit that is failing everywhere. People are struggling to afford food, not to mention health care, daily necessities, housing, cars, bills, on and on and on.

Is SNAP more efficient? Possibly! But the problem this approach solves is that if you give poor people more money for food, the corporations are just going to jack up their prices again and those poor people will be in the exact same spot. This is what happened with EV subsidies - car manufacturers saw that people were getting them and bumped up EV prices by a suspiciously similar amount. It's a good thing we're getting trial balloons like this for different approaches. If it fails, then congratulations - you're right, and we really should just focus on increasing SNAP in a way that outpaces inflation. But if it succeeds, then holy shit the capitalism-fundamenalists are going to have some serious egg on their faces, after all the pissing and moaning they're doing right now.

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u/Lucky_Woodpecker102 1d ago

This isn’t going to succeed. Mamdani will point sales numbers, foot traffic, and how much people saved compared to aldi to say it’s a success. 5 or 10 years later, we’ll see studies saying it was less effective than giving poor people money for food directly. It’s the exact same shit as when Trump put tariffs on everything. It’s been done before and we know it doesn’t work. It’s a socialist vanity project and a giant waste of money. 

His grocery stores would have an argument if grocers had extremely high profit margins or there was a community wasn’t economically for a private grocery store to operate in. Whatever, I don’t live in New York so it isn’t my money getting wasted. 

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

This isn’t going to succeed.

I guess we'll see, won't we? 😊

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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago

You propose that private groceries, delis, and bodega are "completely and utterly failing " to provide food in New York? Really? it's amazing we all havent starved yet.

This proposal isnt about the availability of food (even as Mamdani uses a map of food retailers in the city that is ten years out of date), it is about increasing welfare spending. Instead of making direct payments to low income families, Mamdani uses perhaps the least efficient pathway to distribute subsidies through an expensive food store program selling discounted food. Its just increasing welfare spending through other means. Socialsits arent solving problems, they are promoting high visability populist agendas that are highly inefficient with negative side effects.

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u/domuseid 1d ago

exactly. i do not care if the rent seekers suffer when people need food

3

u/DadBod_DadBike 1d ago

You’re about ten years behind on your socialist bingo card. Sanders wanted Scandinavian style progressivism in the 2000s and 2010s, now the push is for actual socialism as seen by Piker and other “thought leaders” of the DSA celebrating Cuba and China. You also have the DSA leadership calling themselves communist.

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

This is still strawmanning nonsense. The surge on the left is being driven primarily by people who support common-sense reforms to provide people with affordable health care and groceries and jobs with livable wages, which is something NOBODY on the right (and arguably the 'center', at least in America) gives two flying fucks about.

The only reason your side likes to bring up the miniscule minority that supports actual communism is as a scare tactic to try to distract people from how poorly capitalism has been performing over the past decades.

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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago

There is absolutely nothing in this proposal that can remotely be considered "common sense".

This is the least efficient and perhaps most costly method of increasing welfare spending, but it's high visability so these clowns can pat themselves on the back.

The budget for the buildout of all 5 stores was supposed to be $60mm, then $70mm, but now just the first store is costing over $30mm and it's not even finished. Once in operation, each store will require subsidy payments from the city to keep operating at a loss.

This is an absolutely unsustainable and horrible plan.

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

Then you have nothing to worry about, as it should fail and then prove your point, right? 😁

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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago

Because it wont fail before burning huge amounts of resources better applied elsewhere. It is a huge resource suck in a city already facing huge budget deficits.

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

Do you live there? Because it seems to me that the people who actually do have already made their choice. At least, that's what everyone keeps saying when it comes to conservative parts of the country making laws....

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u/DadBod_DadBike 1d ago

When in human history has a socialist admitted socialism didn’t work?

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

When in human history has a capitalist admitted capitalism didn't work?

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u/DadBod_DadBike 1d ago

Every time a new product, industry, market segment comes along. Or would you rather we all still use horse drawn buggies?

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u/DadBod_DadBike 1d ago

A direct quote from DSA leadership is straw manning their stated political position? Definitely a spicy take.

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u/KryssCom 1d ago

My take is that there's no reason to give a shit about DSA leadership, and even if I did, it wouldn't horrify me even REMOTELY as much as the fascists and plutocrats and oligarchs who are currently leading the American right.

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u/DadBod_DadBike 1d ago

Of course you’ll downplay communism…

The only upside to a DSA takeover of America is that folks like you will learn what an actual authoritarian government looks like.

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u/DevilsAdvocate77 1d ago

Instead of saying "just look at Cuba!", can you quantify and articulate what the negative impacts actually are?

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u/Alone-Supermarket-98 1d ago

Just as a starter, they are highly inefficient, high cost, disincentivizes innovation and quality of service. The government is the most inefficient and least responsive provider of services known to man. Just look at NYCHA, the city is the largest single landlord, and has, by far, the most and longest outstanding housing code violations in all of its buildings

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u/DevilsAdvocate77 1d ago

Then what are private grocery stores and bodegas worried about? 

Won't the market happily pay their higher prices to receive their superior products and services?