I was very skeptical of these plans at first—as a New Yorker, I don’t exactly have a lot of trust in our city’s government to run things well.
But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.
"Hey, let's try something new!" without a plan for success is just a recipe for failure.
I honestly don't understand the desire for municipal grocery stores at all. Grocery stores famously operate on super slim margins, so it's not like they're raking in the dough. Many of them are often run extremely well. In Texas, HEB is so beloved that a lot of people consider it far better at disaster recovery operations than the actual government.
I'm not against plans to better help people afford groceries, but somebody needs to at least explain how the plan is economically rationally viable, not just "let's try something new!"
There gotta be a lot of accounting magics working here. Otherwise you can't explain why they simply don't sell everything and buy bonds. I don't have a theory so hopefully some finance people can explain.
As an outsider, it will be interesting to see a pilot at minimum. I'd be hesitant for NYC if it rolled out massively expensive stores across the entire city without understanding if it succeeds at the small scale. I'm not sure why this succeeding or failing has to be viewed as a violation of a sacred value.
Governments should do more experiments, and this does seem to have been thought out enough to not be a total waste of money.
I believe it's simple tribal behavior, combined with American blindness to a "free market". They'd rather be correct and put everything in a good / bad bucket instead of experimenting and learning from the experience.
So many conservative states and cities absolutely running things into the ground, making people miserable and oppressed and their cost of living skyrocketing for years, decades, look at Texas look at Florida, so many examples
So why not try something progressive for a change and see what happens?
- A number of "officials" (friends) will get cushy jobs for running this program.
- It will lose millions of tax dollars
- a small portion of the population will get cheaper produce for a photo op
- Mamdani and friends will call it a success
- But net, this will be net negative for the city (ie. tax dollars to crony jobs and subsidizing food for some).
Whats the point? The USSR has tried this (subsidized grocery stores centrally planned). Lets not.
If on the other hand, the issue was hey its expensive to bring produce XYZ, so why don't we work to reduce that cost by legalizing Kei [1] trucks and exempt from tolls. Now that would be something interesting.
Yeah it was so successful that people would line up around the block for bananas the one time a year. Or when boots came into the store you'd pick up whatever size you could, as you'd trade later.
Updated - since my text was confusing. The subject at hand is subsidized grocery stores, the USSR is an example of failed centrally planned subsidized grocery stores.
My fil owns a bunch of grocery stores in Russia. The gov't still essentially subsidizes the cost of basic goods to keep prices low for the poor. Because of this, even the poorest have access to what they need, and they worship Putin because of it - "he makes sure we're taken care of". Obviously we could get into the corruption, why they're so poor in the first place, etc, but it is clearly working pretty well.
Also in Israel, stable basic products (like milk) have a government mandated pricing, not even subsidized.
It’s a good idea in its simplistic form, and works well most of the times, but once every 2 years you get a crunch where the manufacturers just decline to produce products at a loss, so we don’t have milk or butter for 2 weeks.
NY Post wailing aside, it’s unclear that hizzoner has engaged in that much personal graft. There’s also no evidence presented that the staff of this program are being hired through a graft scheme.
You could be right about it losing millions of dollars, we’ll see. Millions isn’t very much on the scale of NYC’s civic infrastructure; it would be difficult to even call it a waste at that scale, since the results will themselves be valuable.
The USSR fell before I spoke my first words. The world is a very different place, and the United States works very differently from the USSR.
At worst, some people will get some cheaper groceries out of this. If you want to get mad about government spending, maybe we shouldn't be building a ballroom attached to the White House.
As opposed to the millions that come out of your pocket on top of the taxes you pay? At least this brings some of the tax money back to the people. When you let grocery store price gouge you without competition, the money goes to executive pay and shareholder value.
A gov run grocery store will have to pay rent and taxes.
The only difference is it doesn’t have to make profits to pay its owners.
The question is, why are you prioritizing being “fair” to people profiting off hunger, over being fair to working people trying to eat? Even if it is “unfair” this is a kind of unfair we should all support (assuming it succeeds at feeding people).
And even worse, last estimate I saw was 30 million to open a store! 30 million! Graft is alive and well. Communism is a dismal failure, and I don't want to live through it myself. Say no to communism.
But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.