Hopefully, La Marqueta will be renamed La Marxista for clarity. It will follow a long line of failed state-operated and city-operated stores. Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, also pledged such city-run stores.
It is notable that the stores received such emphasis by Mamdani. It is not difficult to set up a grocery store, particularly when you run the city that approves permits and compliance conditions. It is not even difficult to set up a money-losing store as long as you have a city budget to pay for it. It is far more difficult to set up an independently sustainable store.
In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss the rise of support for socialism and communism among young citizens who have no experience or memory with the failures of such systems in the 20th Century. I specifically discuss Mamdani and his policies. These are calls that are likely to increase with the emerging new economy:
With the rise of American socialism, there are new calls for state subsidies and even the establishment of state-run grocery stores in places like Chicago. Past efforts have been colossal failures, including the still-ongoing effort in Kansas City. Over seven years, KC Sun Fresh is gushing money with losses in 2024 at $885,000. The millions lost on this store are on top of the $17 million that the city paid to buy the entire strip mall. By 2025, many of the shelves were entirely bare, while private grocery stores were successfully operating in the area. Despite these failures, there are new calls in other states to create their own state-owned stores. In New York City, socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was heralded for his campaign to open up “government-owned, government-operated grocery stores” in 2025. There are also calls to subsidize key industries that are becoming less competitive in the global market—an effort that is unlikely to succeed as jobs are lost to cheap labor markets or automation.
Soon, New Yorkers will be subsidizing grocery stores to artificially support the myth of socialism.
In the Soviet Union, state-run grocery stores were the subject of gallows humor. The “reimagining” of grocery stores left shelves bare with only imagined essential products. The most widely told joke spread just before the fall of the Soviet Union:
A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, “You don’t have any meat?” The clerk says, “No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”
As Mamdani demands a 10% property tax to fund his promises of free buses and other socialist programs, he is returning to the same socialist script. Of course, as the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman noted, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
There is no such thing as ‘democratic socialism’; there is, however, ‘Democrat socialism’ and if it gets the chance it will lead us back down that long-failed road. Chez Odysseus 2.
Of course the store will be staffed by union employees paid a ‘living wage.”
And everything good will be stolen by the managers and shoplifters that NY will never arrest, it will be dirty because of lazy government employees, and whats left on the near empty shelves shelves will be rotten, rancid, uneatable food. Just like every other government ran grocery store.
Are grocery stores gouging us?
Taking Kroger Grocery 2025:
Sales: $147.6 billion
Net Income: $1.02 billion
Net Margin: 0.69%
Grocery stores make 2 cents on a dollar. How long would you stay in such an investment?
Yes they make money.on volume. That is why you shop at a Supermarket store for most of your groceries and only pick up a few needed essentials at the small Quick mart for convenience because the smaller volume means higher prices.
The volume is not just volume gross sales but volume purchases enabled by huge volume of sales. No single store, nor five stores in NYC can complete pricewise without enormous subsidies from the city. These people are fools.
It will probably be a typical welfare program supporting an administratiion-heavy structure of political largess and nepotism. SNAFU
Not productive
The natural monopolies are either government run or else government regulated. Not ordinarily considered, roads and libraries are examples. More ordinarily considered are the utilities with government utility boards.
What is proposed in NYC is similar. An analogy is a state road one is free to travel on versus a faster toll road, which the New York Thruway wassd (and perhaps till is).
Natural monopolies generally involve networks – roads, pipes, wires. (Think water, electricity, train tracks.) It is economically inefficient to have two networks operating side-by-side. The long-term average cost of adding a customer approaches zero. Both factors make it nearly impossible for a startup to compete with established large corporations.
None of that is true with retail stores, including groceries.
Kansas Elder — Yes, my imperfect analog was the New York Thruway.
What we need now is some outside org to study and do detailed documenting on this whole “centralization” project for educational purposes.
For the bargain price of $29 million, I will open a grocery store and run it into the ground better than the mayor can.
No matter how hard you try you will never be that inept. It takes decades of practice to be that bad at something.
I’m sure that’ll work out for the people of NYC like fish and a bicycle, but they, in their idiocy, voted for this pop-up child that appeared from out of nowhere thanks to money, connections, and globalism. The modern DNC installs people, they do not elect them, based on a mushroom headed strategy of believing they are superior, and it is largely based on pandering; the people in these places (especially the young people that don’t know any better) fall for it.
I don’t know what we do except watch them flail, and pray they do not create a mass exodus that destroys the places they flee to, because they seem to be incapable from learning from their mistakes, and assuming personal responsibility for their lives, to them is worse than death. Heaven help us. That is all I can say anymore, because gen z ain’t gonna get the job done.
As my wife and I are moving, was watching something the other day when one of these under 35 darlings paid someone to move their one-bedroom apartment a distance of all of three miles, you’d think they were moving Gibraltar, and complained about the price. This is where we are at, and where we are headed.
Where is the Supreme Court?
Americans cannot be denied their 14th Amendment “liberty” to operate a free enterprise.
No city or state has any power to operate as a private enterprise, with obvious and substantial advantages, a corporation, in the competitive free markets of the private sector.
Public government may not act as private property.
_________________________________________________________
14th Amendment
No State shall…deprive any person of…liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I’m hoping they have really low prices so the real grocery stores do an “Atlas shrug” to NYC.
We get to see Mr Marxy Mayor pretend to be Mr Capitalist with a real unfair advantage: taxpayer money and unchecked power.
Surely we don’t want to discover that “a whole civilization will die tonight” as a result of the magnanimous efforts of Comrade General Secretary Zorro Madmanie.
Along with the project not being sustainable and at great cost, when it fails, it will have driven local suppliers out of business and that area will be left with nothing.
And your evidence for that assertion is….?
In Kansas this idea worked for decades and that is in a deep red town.
X, what is your problem with non-marxist grocery stores and why do you favor such an unfair advantage in a capitalist system?
I have no problem with Mamdani’s idea. Why should I? I also have no problem with private grocery stores either. Why would it be an unfair advantage? The whole reason he’s proposing this is because private groceries abandoned the areas where he’s proposing to put one in. How is that an advantage? The capitalist system failed in those neighborhoods and they left.
It’s not a bad concept and as I have repeatedly pointed out there is a successful example in St. Paul, Kansas in deep conservative county.
This is not a marxist grocery store. It is a community grocery store that was needed because the town was too small for a private person to enter the market. It is very similar to how the colonists handled certain problems.
Mamdami’s solutin is different.
The capitalist system didnn’t fail in those areas. The city did. There are markets everywhere, but the theft and risks of riots drive prices higher and some people out. If the city can’t provide adequate protection then there will be a blight in certain areas.
S. Meyer. “This is not a marxist grocery store. It is a community grocery store that was needed because the town was too small for a private person to enter the market. It is very similar to how the colonists handled certain problems.”
Huh? It’s a city-run grocery store. Your conservative friends call it Marxist because it’s run by the city. The concept is the same and that’s what Mayor Mamdani is proposing.
“The capitalist system didnn’t fail in those areas. The city did. There are markets everywhere, but the theft and risks of riots drive prices higher and some people out. If the city can’t provide adequate protection then there will be a blight in certain areas.”
What the heck are you babbling about? This has nothing to do with riots or lack of protection.
The Kansas example wasn’t because there was no market for it. There was. It just wasn’t profitable for a private person to run one. So the town decided to run one. It’s exactly what Mamdani is proposing. Instead of a town. It’s a borough.
“What the heck are you babbling about?”
Ditto. Whenever you try to show superiority over another poster, you show your defensive and go-to ignorance.
we see through it.
“The concept is the same and that’s what Mayor Mamdani is proposing.”
Is it? The store in Kansas doesn’t offer free groceries. Mandamis does. Start one at a time responding to my points.
“What the heck are you babbling about? This has nothing to do with riots or lack of protection.”
Tell that to the Asian stores that closed down.
“It just wasn’t profitable for a private person to run”
True, but there are plenty of profitable stores existing in NYC.
So far nothing you have said makes Mandami’s store the same as the one in Kansas. It is almost polar opposite.
“And your evidence”
History
Economics
common sense.
And in my other posts I touched on different issues which tell us why you are all wet.
By the way, if the citizens in that city didn’t understand History and economics while having common sense, their market would have failed. You note that they are Republicans and apparently reasonably intelligent. What does that say about Democrats?
I await your responses to the important issues I raised in my comments. Based on history you will run away instead.
They were in Kansas City, MO., not Kansas. It’s a democrat run city. The stores have failed. Not a good portent for New York City.
What seems to be missing from Mamdani’s thought process is any framework for allocating jobs to government or to the private sector. While recognizing that there could be debates about where the line is drawn I think that government responsibility is to provide common services. The private sector (capitalism at least in some form) appears best at providing durable and consumable goods in general and services for individuals. Adam Smith, famously in this the 250th anniversary of his Wealth of Nations, wrote these profound and counter intuitive (at least to Marxists) observations that we would be well off to take to heart, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.” Mayor Mamdani should not confuse the motivation of the grocer (profit) with that of the net result (groceries provided at an reasonable cost).
Volumes could be written to elaborate and expand on the boundaries between the public and private sector so I am not going to do it here and besides I am not particularly competent in this matter. But I just wish that politicians would spend more time thinking about where they could truly best contribute and less time randomly pin balling around problems that they have little chance to actually mitigate and more likely to distort temporarily and with detrimental consequences existing market based solutions.
Well spoken Arnold. One small suggestion – “kicking the can” may be as illustrative as the phrase “randomly pin balling around problems that they have little chance to actually mitigate and more likely to distort temporarily and with detrimental consequences existing market based solutions.”
Arnold, you’re quoting Adam Smith’s ‘butcher and baker’ logic, but you’re missing the fact that in these neighborhoods, the butcher and baker moved to the suburbs 20 years ago. Smith’s ‘self-interest’ only works if there’s a market to begin with. When private capital refuses to provide a basic necessity like fresh food because the margins aren’t high enough, the community’s ‘necessities’ don’t just vanish—they become a public health crisis that taxpayers fund later through ER visits and chronic disease.
Mamdani isn’t ‘pin balling’ around; he’s treating food like the public utility it is. We don’t ask if a paved road or a water main is ‘economically rational’ for a private company to build—we recognize them as the foundation of a working city. This grocery store is simply the next logical step in that infrastructure.
The people in Kansas pay for their food. They are the ones who initially set it up because other stores failed. They support the store. They don’t steal and they make it easy for the store to run because in such a small town they realize the lower the costs the lower their costs and taxes. Small towns have concerned citizens and as you say, small towns like this are Republican.
As I said before this is not new. Their are communities needing a medical doctor (far more important than a long drive for food) or a hospital. They pay for what they want and need, not what someone else thinks they want and need. This is not socialism. This is community action.
In Mandami’s case, it is not the people but the city creating the market which is not paid for the product. The money is forcefully taken from other people in the form of taxes and given to other people who do not care about the costs and will do little to help the entity survive.
S. Meyer, a distinction without a difference. The Kansas town runs the grocery store. It’s no different than NYC running one.
The St Paul grocery was possible because they got a USDA interest free loan. They didn’t “pay for it themselves.” As you say that money was also “ forcefully taken” from YOU.
Your arguments are seriously flawed.
People paying for food in Kansas and free food in NYC is not a difference?
People not stealing in Kansas vs people stealing in NYC is not a difference?
You need to go find where you left your brain.
Grocery stores operate on very thin margins. They are not profitable businesses. you need a very skilled operator to make a store operate in the green I can assure you that the Mayor is not aware of that nor it is not the savvy business strategy Mandami is using. in other words, it will be a failure within the first year if he pays his store personnel, $30 an hour, which is his plan, and between shoplifting and razor, thin margins, this will represent millions of dollars of loss per year per store
Stupid comment.
Yes, grocery stores operate on razor thin margins, but those margins come AFTER expenses. They still make a profit after paying employees, paying rent and paying taxes.
Since this store is not going to pay rent or taxes, there will be more money to pay the employees a higher wage. And they do not intend to run it as a profit making enterprise.
Their only real expense apart from inventory will be wages.
Anon – please consider action and results over opinion when addressing issues. Look how “successful” supermarkets have been in major metropolitan areas governed in blue. For example, look at how many are still open in Washington, DC.
Those of us who have worked in Supermarkets and chains (especially those of us who have performed from bagger to C level exec) know how hard it is to sustain these stores with low margins.
If you need an example of how successful governments are in running and sustaining these “operations” might we suggest:
City-owned grocery store Sun Fresh Market in Kansas City shutters
https://www.supermarketnews.com/store-closings/city-owned-grocery-store-sun-fresh-market-in-kansas-city-shutters
Citing a failure as a success is very effective trolling – less effective as civil discourse, but INFINITELY successful as propaganda. DFTT
@hisotryRepeats, there is a successful store in St. Paul Kansas. It’s been operating for 13 years with a modest profit margin and it’s city owned.
Yeah, that’s what a margin IS dummy. The amount of profit after outlay. a thin margin translates to a small percentage of profit per outlay. Most companies like to make a higher percentage but thankfully our Capitalist system provides for immense competition in the food market due to American consumers having it so good (best in the world, suck it!) which drives competitive margins down. Thankfully grocery stores are good with keeping their huge investments going even with thin margins. Once the marxist’ start “competing” with them unfairly using taxpayer money their margins drive below sustainable which is the true purpose of all marxist policy: to drive out capitalism through force of power.
Calling a grocery store ‘Marxist force’ is a bit dramatic. Is the local library ‘driving out’ Barnes & Noble? Is a public pool ‘unfair competition’ for a private gym? No. We recognize them as public options that set a floor for service. If a private grocer is so terrified of a single city-run store selling eggs at wholesale, maybe their ‘immense’ competitive model wasn’t that strong to begin with.
Mamdani isn’t ‘driving out’ capitalism from East Harlem—he’s filling a vacuum that capitalism abandoned decades ago.
LMAO. Having visited the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) – both as an athlete and as a “tourist”, my thoughts there traveled to amusement for the ignorant, and sympathy for the enslaved. Daily workouts (long distance on defined allowable trek routes) would have multiple tag-team “fellow joggers”, and passing two types of stores (Common – with block long lines and empty shelves; and Party/Elite – less lines, but not much more product, and almost no “luxury” items).
Heil Mamdani for bringing these “assets” to the American Moscow – NYC. Uncle Joe Stalin couldn’t have done any better – OH WAIT, HE DID!!!. And look how wonderful those rising American nomenklatura(party and shadow elite leaders), apparatchiks(bureacrats), Intelligensia(indoctrination specialists posing as STEM/thought intellects), proletariat (working class), kolkhozniks and kolkhoznitsa(collective members), udarniks (Shock workers and strikers) – who will be given infinite “luxury” in housing and goods which will be taken from the actual working class.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, the removal of legislation (democratic law), constitutional executive (elected leaders for the execution of the laws) and judicial branch (enforcement and interpretation of the legislative law). Reduced to simply dual state – one takes care of the “accepted thought processing of law”. New York “citizens” who voted 54% to adopt the dual state – model in which the functioning of a state is divided into a normative state, which operates according to set rules and regulations, and a prerogative state, “which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees”.
Good luck “Big Apple” – like the bolsheviks, you deserve what you have chosen – and look what a wonderful life the United Soviet SOCIALIST Republic provided for the 3 generations following the “revolution”.
OK, NYers, you voted for him. Now NY should ONLY have state run grocery stores. Complete with those $30 million going for graft and grift. Yay! To get an idea how wonderful the state run stores were, please refer to Shostakovich Symphony 13, movement 3 “In the store.” Have fun NY!! The Rotten Apple.
No profit and forced investment?
US Capitalism at it best.
Waiting patiently to see how long it will take for his supporters to be hoisted by their own petards. I have counseled a good friend NOT to return to NYC to live but, unfortunately, family obligations are dictating otherwise.
People have also forgotten or more accurately, never experienced nuclear bomb “get under your desk” drills in the 1950’s. And the Russians were not irrational zealots.