New York City’s socialist mayor is moving fast. Government-run grocery stores in all five boroughs. Essential staples sold at 30% below retail. No exceptions, no gimmicks, just taxpayer-subsidized food every month for the people of New York City.A Cuban immigrant who grew up under exactly this system had the most honest review: “Cost less sounds very good. They did this where I come from. I grew up with this. In the end, it all costs more, and you get less. Thank God, here you can go to another store. Thank God!”
That last line — “thank God, here you can go to another store” — is the entire critique in twelve words. The moment you can’t go to another store is the moment the system stops working for you and starts working for whoever runs it.
Let’s walk through the economics that Mamdani’s team is carefully not discussing. You cannot sell groceries at 30% below retail without either eating the loss or shifting the cost somewhere else. There is no business model that produces 30% discounts out of thin air. The “somewhere else” is New York City taxpayers — the same taxpayers who are already funding the construction of the stores, the staffing, the infrastructure, and whatever administrative apparatus manages them. The subsidy is real. The cost is real. The only thing that isn’t real is the idea that this helps anyone in the long run.
When government stores undercut private retailers by 30%, the private retailers lose business. The bodegas — the actual small business owners, the working-class immigrant entrepreneurs Mamdani constantly invokes as his constituents — get undercut by a competitor that doesn’t have to make a profit because taxpayers are covering the difference. Some of them will close. The neighborhood will lose a business. And the remaining option will be a government store where supply is managed by bureaucrats rather than market demand.
Anyone who has waited in a Soviet-era bread line, or watched Venezuelan grocery shelves empty after price controls made it unprofitable to stock them, knows where this ends. It ends with restrictions on how much you can buy — because unlimited 30% discounts on unlimited quantities of food are unlimited losses. It ends with shortages of the items most in demand, because market signals that tell producers what to make and distribute have been replaced by political signals that tell bureaucrats what looks good in a press conference.
Daniel Di Martino — a Venezuelan immigrant with firsthand knowledge of what this looks like in practice — said it plainly: “This is how they started with government grocery stores, mass nationalization and price controls in Venezuela.”
Mamdani is giving New Yorkers a preview of what socialism actually produces — not the campaign poster version with smiling families and affordable food, but the real version, where the Cuban guy at the bodega tells you about growing up with cost controls and ends with “thank God, here you can go to another store.”
Enjoy it while it lasts, New York. Mamdani is working on that part too. This is how it all ends.