I & I Editorial BoardZohran Mamdani, winner of the Democratic Party’s New York City mayoral primary, is overflowing with Marxist ideas of how to govern that are so lousy that it’s hard to believe he got more than his own vote in Tuesday’s election. Each of them is horrendous, from free bus services to rent control to punitive taxes on those who create prosperity, but none are quite so laughable as his proposal to establish a chain of city-run grocery stores.
Mamdani’s campaign literature – overflowing with empty leftist jargon – says if elected he “will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit.” The mission “is lower prices, not price gouging.”
In an interview, the socialist Mamdani said he wants “a pilot program of one store in each borough that builds on the feasibility study that was done in Chicago,” which, incidentally, was never released and has been put on a dusty shelf where it will grow moldy.
Apparently not even that city’s Marxist mayor believed he could make the idea work.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine any adult would propose opening government-owned grocery stores. The concept might make for spirited debate in a junior high social studies class. In the real world, though, there are consequences.
“If the city of New York is going socialist, I will definitely close, or sell, or move or franchise the Gristedes locations,” says John Catsimatidis, the CEO of the Gristedes chain, which “has been feeding New Yorkers for over 100 years.”
This should alarm Mamdani. It won’t. He’ll be glad to get rid of a dirty profit-monger who doesn’t belong in his socialist utopia.
Far from New York is Erie, Kansas, which became known as the “small town that saved its only grocery store — by buying it.” The city took over Stub’s Market in early 2021 after learning that it was to close.
But it didn’t go well. The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2023 that it was “losing money almost every month.” City Clerk Jamie Janssen told the Journal that the goal was “to narrow losses to under $100,000 this year.” Losses had reached $132,000 the year before, even though volunteers stock the goods, some of which are donated by local businesses.
Last year, after learning that “owning the store is difficult and costly for the city,” Erie sold the market. If a city of not even 1,000 residents can’t keep a small government-owned store from losing $100,000 a year, what will the losses add up to in New York City?
Mamdani says his stores won’t have “to pay rent or property taxes,” which will therefore “reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers.” Yet in Erie, the store “was costing the city quite a bit of money and the city funds,” said Janssen.
“When you’re a municipality and you own a business like that, there’s a lot of overhead,” he said.
Has Mamdani bothered to work out just how his stores would avoid “costing the city quite a bit”? Can he explain how the stores will not have to pay rent when the city already leases tens of millions of square feet from private owners who are paid market rates?
Unlikely, on both counts. The 33-year-old is a typical know-it-all who actually knows nothing. His real-world experience is less than that of typical high school student from flyover country.
“Before being elected to the New York state assembly in 2020, Mamdani only managed to string together three years of employment,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Rob Henderson in the London Telegraph. “This includes a short-lived rap career and a spell on a film project for his mother,” an acclaimed director.
“He has even joked: ‘You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.’”
Beware of the offspring of privilege who want to use the government to magically improve the lives of the lowly and the struggling because they know better. The results are always calamitous.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Unleash Prosperity
Most grocery stores have a profit margin of 1 or 2 percent. A mid-sized store with a million dollars in weekly sales might make just $10K or $20K per week. A local chain with a union even has a clause in the union contract that it can’t close stores making above 1% profit without taking to the union first. There simply isn’t much margin for error here, and there’s no way that a government bureaucracy will resist meddling with the stores until they all are unprofitable, at which point the existence of the stores becomes just another source of patronage for the friends and relatives of the local politicos.
In Pennsylvania they still have archaic “State Stores” run by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board that have a quasi-monopoly on selling alcohol. You can actually go to the official government website and follow the links to order booze: http://www.pa.Gov/agencies/lcb/shop-wine-spirits . Visitors from other states find this weird vestige of post-Prohibition puritanism to be downright bizarre, and they aren’t wrong. It’s a source of patronage, so all efforts to kill this wildly unpopular agency have failed.
About fifteen years ago a well-connected friend of the governor had the bright idea to put machines in stores that sold wine much like a gigantic soft drink machine. Each machine was huge and was rumored to cost a million dollars. The government required patrons to take a breathalyzer test before they could order anything – I kid you not. They also required a state government employee to monitor the machine and check IDs and keep the local bums and teenagers from breaking in and stealing the booze. The poor clerk had nothing to do 90% of the time, so he or she would sit and read newspapers for seven hours a day and occasionally serve customers who passed the breathalyzer test and had ID proving that they were 21. This meant that the clerk would swipe the customer’s credit card and then press a button to get the bottle of booze out of the giant vending machine. They were paid much more than any of the regular clerks or cashiers in the store, for doing less than 10% as much actual physical labor. The state later switched to having a state employee in the state capitol of Harrisburg remotely monitor the breathalyzer test and ID check, and then push the button, because the optics of shoppers seeing a LCB employee sitting around reading newspapers were terrible.
The entire fiasco embarrassed the government so much that the machines were trashed, but it did force them to give local supermarkets a “restaurant license” to sell booze, so it had an accidentally positive outcome.
I kind of hope that they do try government groceries in New York City, because it would make everyone flee for saner places such as Texas and California and transfer Electoral College votes from a blue state to red states.
We are not even selling our birthright-we are giving it away for free. Socialism is a failed policy in every nation it’s been tried. America became great because of capitalism.
This is typical of a society that goes from communism to capitalism to socialism: China, under Mao, was communistic. Mao killed millions trying to achieve his communist Utopia. However, just as communism was taking China to the depths, she switched to capitalism and nearly caught up with the US. Now, under Xi, she is switching back to Socialism/Fascism.
Pretty soon it will switch again to communism.
Why? Because any people will always trade their liberty for security-and communism/socialism promises security.
The approximately 40% of legal immigrants who live in NY fled from countries who were tyrannical and socialistic. They fled to freedom. But they couldn’t handle New York City’s type of freedom (capitalism mixed with socialism/fascism). That’s why many legal immigrants, in my opinion, voted for Mamdani.
Just like Omar Ilhan, they emigrated to America when their countries became to savage for them. Now they want to transform America into the “Utopian” country they fled from.
Welcome to the 21st century!
If they elect this hack, the hipster crowd in NYC will get a real world reality check with regard to what happens when you run out of other people’s money to spend.
There will be free grocery stores in NYC if Mamdani takes charge. Remember no police, no prison? You’ll be able to go into any grocery store in the city, including the “city-owned” stores, and take what you want and skip the check-out line.
It won’t last for long, but it will be free for as long as it lasts.
great maybe the liberals will lear the sssssoviet way empty shelves this guy is a farce he is kamala 2 smiling and seducing the empty peopke who hate the rich who employ people a mess comng chicago is on his way out
Returning to the question of who should have the right to vote to protect and to strengthen the USA!!
Voting age was 21 for decades and decades before the Vietnam War.
Then activists combined two incongruous concepts: the right to vote and being of sound body to be drafted into the military. Hence the voting age was reduced to 18 by a not very wise and exceedingly gullible Congress.
Can anyone say that at 18 anyone really understood policies, politics, the cycle of events or even was aware of all the issues we vote on to be a responsible voter?
So, if it is the 18-21 year olds who are supporting and will vote for the backfiring, proven wrong and dangerous ideas of the Marxist Mamdani for Mayor of NYC. isn’t that the argument we all need to raise the voting age to 21, or even to 25, so we have wiser, better informed and more mature voters to achieve better government?
I was not a well informed voter until I was about 35 years old.
What age did everyone else become a well informed voter?
What rent control does is kill any incentive to build new housing. In the end it means less housing and poor maintenance.
Government has been shown many times that private business is more efficient.