The second location brings the grocery stores’ cost to over half of the $70 million Mamdani has set aside for the pilot program. It’s unclear why the Democratic socialist’s first 9,000 square-foot location calls for $30 million. More puzzling is how New York will develop three more locations and operate all five under Mamdani’s proposed budget. 

“They’re using our tax dollars against our members, and we cannot compete,” Garcia noted. He’s right. 

Pak said “city-owned” grocery stores may be a public-private partnership during the hearing. New York would fully subsidize the store’s development. A contracted operator would run it rent-free. If true, City Hall will decimate fair competition by playing favorites.

Regardless, taxpayer-funded grocery stores have a disappointing track record in America. 

Take Kansas’s KC Sun Fresh. The city-owned supermarket shut down in August, after years of dysfunction. Kansas City spent $17 million redeveloping the shopping center — and opened its doors in 2018. 

A private grocer ran the store until 2022, when the nonprofit group Community Builders of Kansas City assumed operations. At the Washington Post’s reporting of KC Sun Fresh’s financial and crime woes, the store lost $885,000 over the previous year. A $750,000 taxpayer cash injection proved pointless as shelves lay bare. Kansas City burned $29 million on KC Sun Fresh at its closure.

A new store, United Market KC, took over the former Sun Fresh location on May 20. United Market KC is an affiliate of Associated Wholesale Grocers — a private operation. 

Baldwin Market, another town-owned and operated supermarket, shut its doors in March 2024. The store’s conservative location in rural Florida brought national attention when it opened in 2019. But the store struggled to break even from its inception. 

Baldwin Market’s first fiscal year ended with a $61,000 operating loss. The store saw a $178,000 shortfall in the next fiscal year through September 2021, which continued through the year following. 

Those sympathetic to a “public option” for food may argue that these failed projects are underfunded — the common rebuttal when public services such as education or transportation fail to meet the quality Americans demand. 

But underinvestment is not the problem. Mamdani’s $70 million pilot eclipses both KC Sun Fresh and Baldwin Market. It could still fail. Why?

The former Queens assemblymember lambasted NYC food markets’ “price gouging” during his initial city-owned grocery store proposal on the campaign trail. “Some stores are even using dynamic pricing, jacking up the cost over the course of a day depending on what they can get away with,” Mamdani said in a TikTok post.

But prices aren’t an exploitative tool operators whimsically jack up, especially in a business with a 1% to 2% profit margin. Prices signal consumer preferences and producer inventory. And those prices are sensitive in a business model with high overhead, perishable products, fragile supply chains, and brutal competition. Success requires wit, diligence, and care — all antonyms of bureaucracy. Ask KC Sun Fresh’s nonprofit developer and operator, who both recently sued Kansas City for neglecting the site.  

Mamdani doesn’t care about burning through 70 million taxpayer dollars to experiment with his socialist pet projects, though. 

MAMDANI TROLLS REAGAN AND THATCHER BUT PROVES THEM RIGHT

“No matter how you think about the idea, I do think there should be room for reasonable policy experimentation in our cities and in our country, where we actually test out our idea,” Mamdani said on The Bulwark podcast. “And if they work, they work. And if they don’t, c’est la vie, then the idea was wrong.”

Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll Mamdani’s grocery experiment while existing grocers are forced to compete against City Hall. New York does not need government-run supermarkets. It needs leaders who understand that food prices fall when competition, efficiency, and private investment are allowed to work, not punished.